This book summarises 15 years of research (2007-2021) on the exploitation of digitaltechnologies for VET. In other words, our activities started the same year as the firstiPhone was launched! Four research groups formed the leading house on the topic,named DUAL-T, where T stands for technologies and DUAL refers to the Swiss VETsystem, relying to a great extent upon the alternating of days at school and days inthe workplace. This uniquely long-term research scheme has gathered more than 50research scientists, produced 13 doctoral theses, led to the development of multipledigital learning environments and enabled dozens of empirical studies on thousandsof apprentices and hundreds of teachers and company trainers. DUAL-T developeda network of stakeholders, including vocational schools and companies, but alsomany professional organizations and cantonal or national public entities. This bookdoes not provide a detailed account of all these activities, which have been publishedelsewhere.But it proposes several answers to the question:“Which digital technologies contribute to the enhancementof vocational education?”In VET systems, as well as in other education sectors, the choice of educational platformsis not made by teachers but is often a decision taken at the school, the districtor a higher hierarchical level. Therefore, along our 15 years of negotiationswith schools, many teachers declined to use one of our tools because they were constrainedby these top-down decisions. In this book, we aimed to make design choicesas independent as they could possibly be from school platforms. Some constraintscould not be avoided, but some ideas that used our tools could be implemented withWhatsApp, Instagram, MS Teams and Google Drive.
QC 20250813