e-Protect’s Competency Scale is now released!
Author: Chara Pilidou
Designing and supporting inclusive practices in Higher Education
The InclusiveHE project focuses on supporting inclusiveness towards individuals of diverse ethnic or social backgrounds, regardless of religion, sexual orientation, migrants, people with disabilities, and other disadvantaged groups in higher education. InclusiveHE will develop the tools and resources that will support universities and other higher education institutions to develop innovative policies and practices for integrating inclusive practices in the process of designing and teaching courses and is expected to elevate the supply of high quality inclusive higher education opportunities for all.
Target groups and stakeholders in higher education, including education faculty and instructors, policymakers, and university leadership teams, learning designers, and support staff as well as students, will benefit from receiving innovative and quality guidelines and support regarding the development of inclusive practices that foster inclusion. In specific, target groups will be introduced to the stages of the design-thinking approach in order to apply this method in the design of their education programmes. This methodology serves as a framework that helps individuals to define problems, collaborate with others, develop possible solutions, and refine them through various reiterations until a viable solution is generated.
Drugs Awareness Training & Education
DATE – Drugs Awareness Training & Educationaims to elevate the conception and knowledge that will shape attitudes and promote empathy to drug abuse. The implementing partners of the project will share and discuss best practices regarding drug awareness and prevention, utilising their expertise and shared knowledge in the field to develop and make available a cohort of innovative tools that will contribute to holistic approaches to thwart drug abuse.
The DATE Project aims to provide a holistic approach to drug awareness and prevention by enhancing the power of education as the main focus to alert and prevent substance abuse.More specifically, the DATE project aims to bring drug awareness education to young digital citizens in their online environments. The Date project will develop the first interactive infographic-based drug awareness campaign and educational resources. The direct target groups of the project are front-line youth workers and young people.
Traditions, Recipes, and Cuisines of Europe using Smartphones
Inclusive learning societies should be one where people are given opportunities to develop and to cooperate as equal individuals. By harnessing ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), barriers to participation for older people and migrants could be removed by using mobile phones as a learning tool.
In this aspect, the project TRACEUS – Traditions, Recipes, and Cuisines of Europe using Smartphones – aims to develop and curate a database of recipes, cuisines, and traditions associated with European cuisines using mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) as learning tools. More specifically, the TRACEUS project aims at using an accessible model which builds on harnessing inclusive technology learning for citizens (older people and migrants) at risk of being e-excluded in the traditional sense and ensuring that their culinary customs and traditions are recorded in an accessible way. Target groups of learners will benefit from receiving quality training to become authors of digital content in which they can share knowledge, skills, and experiences.
The VET-ification of Online Gaming through innovative challenge-based learning
According to Eurostat, in 2019, 16.4% of young adults in the EU, aged 20-34 years old, were neither employed nor receiving training nor education. CARDET, in collaboration with Association de Gestion des Fonds Européens from France and partners from 6European Union countries, participate in the project CASINO, under the ERASMUS+ KA2 programme of the European Commission.
The CASINO project aims to motivate NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) to engage in vocational education and training by developing a compendium of Digital Breakouts to develop key transversal skills such as literacy, numeracy, critical and creative thinking, taking the initiative, learning to learn through information retention, and digital literacy.NEETs will enhance their professional profile as they will be equipped with innovative methodologies and strategies to use learning materials. Thus, they will gradually grow their development with learning, personal development, self-esteem, and motivation.
Intergenerational mentoring and learning in the workplace
With increasingnumbers of employed people with jobs at risk due to advances in technology or demand for new skillsets and approximately 7 out of 10 EU workers requiring at least moderate digital skills to do their job (Cedefop), the digitalisation of jobs and tasks is an emerging trend. This means that training adults for acquiring core skills needed to succeed in their careers is vital for their future employability. The EU Commission communicated an inclusion and diversity strategy in 2017 promoting the inclusion of older staff to equal work opportunities as younger staff.
The LearnGenproject’s focus is to combat segregation, discrimination, and social exclusion of marginalised workers. It supports older workers (aged 50+) as well as young workers (18-30 years) to develop necessary core skills to teach and learn from each other, making them less vulnerable to professional challenges. The main project outcomes include an Intergenerational Learning Curriculum, a Training Package for employees trained to become Mentors and an eLearning Platform and OERs available to the general public. LearnGen also supports SME managers, HR Managers and Trainers to design, implement and monitor effective inclusive policies and practices. The project is expected to bring about deeper understanding at organisational and transnational level, on combating ageism and social exclusion.
CTApp: Teaching Students Computational Thinking Through a Mobile Application
Computational Thinking as a fundamental competency that all literate citizens should develop through compulsory education, to complement the three other core skills, that is, reading, writing, and mathematics. Computational Thinking (CT) is a thought process (or a human thinking skill) that uses analytic and algorithmic approaches to formulate,analyse and solve problems.
In recent years, Computational Thinking (CT) have also been promoted by most educational stakeholders as a skill that is as fundamental for all as numeracy and literacy and is considered a universal competence,which should be added to every child’s analytical ability as a vital ingredient of their school learning.
In this context, the CTApp project aims to develop create a mobile game that encourages young people to acquire computational thinking skills.
In particular,the project has three objectives:
- A State of the Art on Serious Gaming & Computational Thinking.
- The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Mobile Serious Game in Computational Thinking (CTApp).
Teacher Training Courses & Materials development on using the CTApp mobile game (e.g., handbooks &instructive videos).
Modelling a European Cross-curricular Study Programme for Upper Secondary Schools
DEEDS aim to contributing to the construction of the European Education Area through the development of a model of European exchange and study programme among general upper secondary schools.
DEEDS has the following objectives:
- To develop and test a joint transnational curriculum/programme among the involved schools.
- To identify a set of common assessment and certification methods tailored to the acquired competences and skills.
To build organisational capacity in upper secondary schools through the identification and the solution of administrative/management problems pertaining long term transnational mobility of pupils.
Promoting global citizenship education in schools
We are all living in an interconnected and interdependent world; technological advances have surpassed distance allowing the instant transfer of information, images, experiences from one corner of the globe to the other. Issues such as migration and climate change dictate actions that transcend the narrow nation-state boundaries and pose challenges that cannot be addressed unilaterally. As the devastating COVID-19 pandemic spreads it comes to manifest in bleak colours the fluidity of national frontiers and the inalienable bond of humans against a common threat.
As defined by UNESCO, Global citizenship refers to a sense of belonging to a broader community and a common humanity. It emphasizes political, economic, social, and cultural interdependency and interconnectedness between the local, national and the global. Despite its importance, global citizenship education is in its nascent phase and currently it is not introduced in schools. Moreover, the ever-increasing peoples’ movement calls for teachers to be well versed in working in multicultural environments, support students from culturally diverse backgrounds, and instil respect for cultural diversity and human rights. Teachers lack the initial training or CPD resources to integrate global citizenship issues in their teaching. This project aims to address the evident gap in the provision of global citizenship education in secondary schools and to support teachers to promote and integrate global citizenship in their teaching.
POLITEIA is an Erasmus+ project that aims to address the gap in the provision of global citizenship education in secondary schools and to support teachers to promote and integrate global citizenship in their teaching.
The project seeks to build an innovative, tailored training course addressed to teachers to allow them to confidently bring global citizenship issues in the classroom, integrate its themes and values in the citizenship course or across curricula, and ignite students’ interest in global citizenship.
OVERCOME – Positive career guidance for low skilled adults
Although Europe has been recovering from the high unemployment of the recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns that were implemented have had a significant impact on local and global economies. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that more than 25 million jobs will be lost in the coming months, as a result of the outbreak. Current data show that by the end of 2019 the unemployed in EU-28 were 15,475 million. At the same time, low-skilled adults have limited labour market prospects compared to other individuals with more qualifications (OECD, 2019), with unemployment having a huge psychological impact on them.
OVERCOME is an Erasmus+ project that aims to enhance low-skilled adults’ competencies and support their inclusion in the labour market and society, by reinforcing their employability skills as well as their psychological capacities. To achieve this, it will build the skills of career counsellors and adult educators to better support low-skilled adults; it will build the psychological capital of low-skilled adults and develop resources with quality material, curricula, toolkits, and OERs to build the competencies of low skilled-adults and their educators.