die Berater® pilot the development of Knowledge Partnerships !

Earlier this year the EU commission launched a call for “Pilot projects for the development of Knowledge Partnerships” (EACISO3/2012). The general objective of the call for proposals was to support the implementation of Knowledge Alliances which should ensure stronger societal and economic relevance, and outreach in higher education, by strengthening the role of higher education institutions as engines of innovation and increasing the employability, creativity and innovative potential of graduates, professors and company staff. Knowledge Alliances are structured partnerships aimed at stimulating innovation by bringing together businesses and higher education institutions.

The call met huge interest; over 100 consortiums applied for a grant, only 3 were selected. The project EDUCCKATE, which was developed by die Berater®, together with the University College London (GB), Quality Programe (IT) and OLN Learning (GR) and 7 further partners, was successful.
The project will implement an innovative mentored internship scheme to boost the innovation potential of HE institutions & companies, foster an entrepreneurial mindset in students & promote entrepreneurship.

The cultural & creative (CC) sectors make places attractive to live, invest in & visit; they’re key to sustainable economic growth. Recent reductions in public funding have lead to job losses & loss of expertise in small & medium sized CC organisations (SMEs). In an insecure economic environment, large graduate employment schemes are over-subscribed & SMEs report an application shortage. A new generation of entrepreneurs is needed to increase the long-term sustainability of the CC sectors & increase flexibility to future economic changes.

The project provides students in CC majors with: access to businesses, including CC SMEs; opportunities to develop business projects & new professional paths. It benefits HE Institutes through links with CC businesses & businesses by partnership with specialist HE departments in order to develop new sector specific services/products/prototypes with commercialisation potential that benefit from state-of-the art academic research/knowledge.

Three ways to combat Violence Online!

Are you a Facebook user? Do your kids chat with their friends online?  Are you a parent or teacher who is concerned about what internet content is available to young people – and how they use it?

The European Project Virtual Stages Against Violence - VSAV (Daphne III Programme) has been developing material for young people 10-16 years old to highlight the dangers of the digital age.  An online game, pieces of interactive educational theatre and a teachers’ toolkit were developed on the basis of the research and needs analysis with the young people, teachers and parents at European schools, and have all proven popular and successful strategies for sensitising young people to the perils of the internet. 

With the Online-game “The Big Brain” and the theatre plays young people may learn how important it is not to reveal personal data or passwords when using new technologies. These innovative materials also show young people how false identities on the internet can be damaging. Besides the risks of new technologies the project VSAV especially addresses the positive potential that new media and other technologies entail:

• The Big Brain: Online-game
• Channel Troy: Watch the whole theater play here
• Teachers’ Toolkit: Download the toolkit for free

The toolkit will be soon available in German for download on the project website. A Training Course  was held in Palermo Italy for educators and teachers coming from the four countries participating in the project (Italy, Romania, Austria and Germany) where the Educational Guide “Toolkit – Digital & Media Literacy Education” were presented.  The text, written by Maria Ranieri (University of Florence, Department of Education, Educational Technology Laboratory), focuses on five key themes: Participation, Credibility, Identity, Privacy, Authorship and Creativity.

During the Training, educators could learn about and experiment the proposed activities in Toolkit which they have tested in the classroom in their countries.  The toolkit was tested in Austria in November 2012. The testing was carried out with pupils of secondary and vocational schools, aged 13 to 17. 

One example of the educational material is in the form of a WIKI – co-authored by teachers and pupils, this tool gave young people the opportunity to conduct guided research and engage in online  classroom discussions, using new media to contribute to web-content.

International Conference „Never Late to Learn! Promoting Opportunities for Learning in Later Life”

 

 

On 25th of October 2012 the final conference of the GRUNDTVIG Multilateral Network “ENLL – Never Late to Learn” took place in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference was organized by E-NLL GRUNDTVIG Multilateral Network, supported by the European Commission – Lifelong Learning programme, with the participation of 26 organisations from 14 different European countries.

The conference started with an introduction of the E-NLL network. The network aims at inclusion of elderly people in lifelong learning through offering models for learning, mobility and volunteering. The E-NLL network provides a collection of good practices from various European countries, offering various models for senior education activities.



At the conference international project partners presented current challenges in the field of senior education. The experts raised concern about the necessity of establishing meaningful recreational activities and successful strategies to enhance seniors to gain digital competences in later life.

Another focus of the conference was the topic of competence development in senior volunteering, also in the context of intergenerational learning.

The afternoon programme was a discussion panel with Bulgarian volunteers and international experts on the role of various institutions, social partners and other stakeholders for Learning in Later Life and its success factors. The conference was closed with a presentation of good practices and events, organized by the E-NLL network.

die Berater^®, one of the participating organizations of the E-NLL network, was awarded with the grade label  NESTORGOLD, which rewards companies and organisations that implemented a balanced and appropriate age management and at the same time promote their female and male employees according to their potentials, needs and stages of life.

 The objective of the grade label NESTORGOLD is to strengthen the awareness of Austrian companies and organisations about the particular merit of elder employees, and at the same time initiate the organisation of an age appropriate, life phase-oriented and gender-sensitive working environment for all generations.

How to measure informal competences?

What are the personal, social and organisational competences needed to be successful in the service economy and how can these competences be measured? – this question sums up the issues that the LLP project VITA currently works on. With European societies being more and more based on the service economy, professional lives are increasingly determined by the need for continuous learning to adapt to rapidly changing demands and concepts like external (customer) orientation, team work/ cooperation, etc. Especially social competences are necessary for effective management in the service sector and are becoming competitive factors at the job level and as such aspired competences both for employment and societal reasons.

These rather cross-cutting competences are often learnt in informal contexts, be it in extracurricular activities connected with school education, societal learning (active citizenship) or organisational learning in higher education beyond formalised curricula. Thus the mentioned competences are being developed in a sphere that overlaps all educational sectors: schools, higher education, VET and adult education.

As far as the validation of these competences is concerned an "off the shelf"-assessment against standardised systems (e.g. entirely developed on basis of EQF, ECVET and ECTS) is barely conceivable because in most of the cases they are not suitable to display non-cognitive learning outcomes that determine service orientation, such as interaction, tolerance, commitment, motivation etc.

VITA intends to link formal validation approaches based on EQF with evidence of social and personal competence development which are essential in the service sector.
The project is currently seeking for experts from informal/non-formal pioneer projects in any learning domain to inquire them about innovative approaches and projects to validate service-related competences. In order to make this inquiry process as efficient as possible, we have created an online questionnaire which can conveniently be filled in online and can be found here:
http://dieberater.vitasurvey.sgizmo.com/s3/

Healthbox – successful work in adult education

 

Almost one year after the EU-Grundtvig project “Healthbox- Integration of Health Issues in Adult Education”  came to a successful end, the potential remains for the broader, continued usage of the material. Trainers from across various countries expressed their interest in using the Healthbox material in their work with people from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Promoting healthy lifestyles through education

In September, Doncaster College (UK) started to use the Healthbox with 3500 learners, and following positive feedback on the project outcomes, die Berater® went on to share information  about the educational input of the Healthbox through internal workshops for their trainers. In these workshops groups discussed the usage of the Healthbox in different training settings, providing additional practical dissemination channels.
The training materials can be downloaded here: www.bridgestoeurope.com