How to predict learning outcome? CRITON event held in Vienna, Austria

On Wednesday, March 19th 2014, die Berater® held a dissemination seminar called EU Cafe for the CRITON project as well as for two other European projects. With the EU Cafe, die Berater® aims to provide an informal insight into its current EU projects.

The project CRITON is a transnational cooperation project to enhance the learning process in distance education systems and e-learning, using assessment methods for predicting the progress of students and to improve evaluation methods leading to better learning outcomes and more personalized learning.

CRITON aims to provide innovative solutions to meet the learning needs of the three main target group:
1. Learners of all levels involved in e-learning or distance learning
2. Tutors and teachers in adult education using e-learning or distance learning
3. Institutions of adult education offering courses with e-learning or distance learning
offering a modern web based environment (a smart platform) to be applied in all educational levels that use e-learning.

Holger Bienzle during his welcoming speech

The opening speech was held by Holger Bienzle, head of bridges to europe at die Berater. Afterwards project coordinator Mr Erol Koc introduced the 28 participants to the CRITON project and invited them to take an active part in the upcoming piloting phase. The main aim of the event was to introduce the participants to the CRITON platform for assessing the possible success or failure of learners in their engagement in eLearning settings.

Discussion round with participants

The participants, mainly consisting of trainers in adult education, engaged in an open discussion about the use of predicting learning outcomes. Their main point of interest was the importance of monitoring and analyzing learnering progress as well as how teachers can even better prevent an underachievement of learning outcomes.

A big PLUS for education: The new EU funding programme Erasmus+ has started!

• Plus 40 % of funding for education, youth and sport!
• Plus simplified implementation rules!!
• Plus many more funding opprtunities for innovative projects!

The new EU funding programme Erasmus+ officially started with the New Year and published the first Call for Proposals with deadlines on 17 March 2014 (mobility projects) und 30 April 2014 (cooperation projects).

In total 14.7 billion Euro will be availaible in the coming seven years for exchanges of staff and learners, in-service-training courses abroad, development and piloting of innovative educational products, „knowledge alliances“ of education providers and enterprises, filling sectoral skills gaps and other aspects of lifelong learning.

bridges to europe, the international plattform for project management, can help you to use these new funding opportunities in the best possible way: by strategically focusing your project, finding suitable and reliable cooperation partners or writing the entire project proposal for you.

More info on Erasmus+ go to http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/index_de.htm

You want to know more about bridges to europe? Visit our website www.bridgestoeurope.com 

Are you involved in EU Projects? Then join the Project Actors Community in Europe

Are you involved in European Projects and interested to improve your project management performance?  The new EU Grundtvig project PACE (Project Actors Community in Europe), coordinated by die Berater®, takes up the issue of European Project Management. 

A high number of valuable tools, training materials, internet resources and other guidance publications have been developed and produced in various LLP projects   However, the take-up and use of these tools by the wider EU project community has not been as great as it could have been, for a number of reasons: they are often hard to locate, they are not regularly updated and the full potential for Social- and Multi Media in the dissemination and valorisation of these products is often not used.

PACE builds a Community of Practice of European project actors with the aim of supporting each other by

• collecting,
• sharing,
• updating,
• further improving
• and disseminating

existing tools for transnational project management. Through an interactive communication and learning platform members of the community can share experiences and develop tools in the main topic areas of European project management.

In addition to the platform PACE will develop and implement new forms of self-organised events - PACE BarCamps -  for networking and sharing good project-management practice

The first Pace BarCamps will take please in Florence, Italy in November 2014!

EU project managers are invited to join PACE and participate in the development of a new and innovative European project management kit! Now that the project has just started, the platform is work in progress. Early birds are welcome to share their experiences and to discuss new trends in European project management linked to the new ERAMUS+ programme.

Find more information on www.projectactors.eu

Tackling youth unemployment

Feeling lost is something experienced by a lot of young people and can be found throughout Europe. In Spain more than 55 percent of young people are unemployed; this does not give young people a great deal of perspective, prospect or hope in finding work.
 
With the EU-Project Youth Employment Support (YES), die Berater® established an innovative training and coaching toolkit to support HR managers, recruiters and in-company advisors who employ and educate young people from marginalised groups.
 
The Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation Project „Big Bang“ adapts these existing materials to address current issues of youth unemployment and to ‘build a bridge’ between work-based culture and the culture of social exclusion. This will include addressing the problem of low ambition of young people and those who are participating in anti-social and/or negative peer group behaviour, such as ‘gang’ culture and offending.
 
The issues addressed by the YES and Big Bang project have now been presented at The European monitoring conference in Brussels on 11th and 12th February 2014 in order to contribute to work-based learning (WBL) and support of youth employment and economic competitiveness in Europe. Established apprenticeship systems are of high relevance when it comes to youth employment, and at the conference one of the key questions was what types of collaboration and support is needed to attract and engage more companies, and particular SMEs, in training young people as the future workforce in Europe

Big Bang is and EU Project funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme. 

You want to now more? Go to http://bigbangllp.eu or contact Bozica Ilijic, Projectcoordinator of the Big Bang Project: b.ilijic@dieberater.com  

Changing perspective through wikis

 

Phones, computers, and mobile devices are essential tools for managing the economy, transportation, and also in the training sector! The Internet is much more than a series of 1s and 0s; it is a complex human system with its own mechanisms, codes and zones of influence. The pervasiveness of this environment in our lives is so important that the internet has become the breeding ground for the major transition from Homo Sapiens to the Homo Numericus.

At first glance, this transition appears chaotic, uncontrolled, unpredictable and completely diffuse, especially in wiki environments. But behind this apparent disorder, chaos in motion, it could be that a new fundamental is at work, with very specific properties. And its applications remain largely unknown.

This fast development can sometimes scare or simply demotivate. Why update one's skills if today’s technology becomes obsolete tomorrow? Who has never felt helpless and a little stupid in front of his computer? Who has never lost important files? Thought a message was sent by a human being when it was sent by a bot? Got lost within multiple versions of a document exchanged with colleagues? Felt outdated and out-of-touch? Or should we see all this as a challenge? The challenge of developing more social and writing skills and critical thinking, the challenge of generating more opportunities to make our projects successful, to see them adopted by the wider community, the challenge of moving "out of the box" in our professional practices. Anticipating developments and changes is one of the strategic skills that any person must acquire.

And this is the challenge and hope of the project WikiSkillls: getting you to hop into the wiki culture.

WikiSkills is a European project funded by the European Commission aiming to analyze and apply benefits of adopting a wiki-culture within educational settings. Traditional learning environments are often characterized by one-way knowledge transmission processes in which the teacher, as only source of knowledge, assigns a learning activity that is conducted autonomously by the student.

Through WikiSkills participants from different educational sectors, cultures and ages (schools, universities, professional and adult training) learn how to use wikis for their socio-professional development. The project developed, implemented and evaluated an innovative training curriculum focusing on how to make the best use of wiki environments in educational settings, so as to reach high learning objectives and foster a community of learners within Europe.

Through this, WikiSkills promotes innovative pedagogical approaches that foster creativity, competitiveness, employability and entrepreneurial spirit, equity, social cohesion and active citizenship.

 

To learn more about WikiSkills go to www.wikiskills.net