Online TC for E+
Online Training Courses for E+ Youth Workers is a strategic project to train people who collaborate in Erasmus + projects, and it aims to create, disseminate and deliver online training courses in different areas of the European Erasmus+ program. It is a project coordinated by the Romanian organization Predict CSD Consulting, and other four European organizations take part, among which there is Asociacion Mundus. This long-term project puts training courses at the disposal of the people working in the field of youth to be trained on volunteering, youth exchanges or mentoring.
Context
This project comes out from a small research that the coordinating organization, Predict Consult, carried out before starting the project. After several meetings and debates about the results of this initial investigation, it was discovered that some NGOs and social organizations have a specific challenge: they don’t have the adequate tools to train their workers in youth programs (especially Erasmus+), or, in the case that these courses exist, they are carried out in a non flexible way, which prevents the access of many of these workers to them.
For example, mentoring is often not a full-time job, and it is difficult to find people specialized in it, especially in smaller communities. These particularities cause a high labor rotation and in short periods of time, and in general the workers do not maintain the expected continuity. This increases because of the temporary space that exist between the different volunteering projects and Youth Exchanges: a person who participates as a group leader in a Youth Exchange may not be available for doing so after some months or the following year. Consequently, the need for a flexible training system to prepare youth workers in the field of Erasmus+ program is visible; people who need to be trained as mentors and facilitators (for EVS), project coordinators and leaders in Youth Exchanges.
The project
To solve out the mentioned lacks and needs, this project offers open and innovative practices in the digital world to develop better skills and competencies in youth workers. This is possible thanks to gamification and Open Educational Resources. The project’s activities promote the training quality in the Erasmus+ program through ten innovative approaches, with the ETS competency model for the creation of a virtual intercultural community, that emerges from four non-formal learning networks and the connection within the world of youth work.
Thanks to this two-years project, a series of online courses will be made available to youth workers, based on the concept of e-learning and educational gamification,which will provide them with the necessary tools for a complete training in the areas of the Erasmus+ program, to ensure their professionalization.
The people who participate in these online training courses will have two learning possibilities: the basic one and the advanced one. At the advanced level the participants will form virtual intercultural communities, composed by the workers of the same field. This will allow the exchange of ideas and good practices between people who work professionally or voluntarily in these areas.
Goals
Project Activities
Partner organisations
The project has five partner organizations, from four countries: Predict CSD Consulting (Romania) as coordinator; Asociación Mundus (Spain), V2020 (United Kingdom), Cesie (Italy) and Millenium Center (Romania) as partners.
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.