According to Eurostat, in 2013 one in every three Portuguese has never used the Internet. Portugal is the fifth country with the highest percentage of people in this situation (33%), preceded by Romania (42%), Bulgaria (41%), Greece (36%) and Italy (35%). On the other hand Denmark and Sweden have the lowest, both with 4%. The average in the 28 EU member countries is 21%. This project aims to address this problem by engaging synergies of nine partners in four countries (Portugal, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany) two of which silent partners (J.P. Inspiring Knowledge and Microsoft International) whose good practices will be shared and validated by the Science and Technology Foundation. This network will work both at local, regional, national and international levels in transversal and trans-sectorial areas, both in terms of the partners involved (academic and enterprise), and in terms of the focus group (VET; adult education with disadvantaged background; HEI with special focus on this group) literacy inclusion, re-qualification and employability. Each partner has strong complementary skills that will be widely useful for the project (cf. part D). As a strategic partnership project this proposal intends to promote actions, to build contents, digital instruments and to analyse the impact of ICT in a glocal (global&local) world, rooted in a process of civilisational change (social, political, economic and cultural). Always taking leverage of the individual skills and competences of each partner, anchored by the best research and state of the art practices. In fact the project aims to: 1) Identify and share good practices in Societal innovations (digital literacy, inclusion and employability); 2) Focus on new knowledge and skills: basic and transversal development; 3) Ensure equity in the exercise of rights, namely to help citizens with disadvantaged backgrounds (social / geographical) to integrate ICT in their lives; 4) (Re) and (up) skilling, access to success; 5) Disseminate results (in a diversity of modes), promote impact (in science, society, technology, policy and market), sustainability, dissemination and exploitation. In order to accomplish these five aims, a progressive path will be divided in the following five steps: 1- Preparation of the project (State of the art, Logo and Webpage development, Promotional videos); 2- Production of multi-format educational content (e-modules, ebook, MOOC); 3- First phase of training (training of the stakeholders); 4- Second phase of training (training of target group by the stakeholders supervised by the project members); 5- Requalification of the target group (MOOC on employability) and final conference/ dissemination of results. The adopted methodology will be, in a first moment, 1) identify the most preeminent needs and ways of integrating ICT in daily life; 2) share current good practices (in the areas of new competences- digital literacy, inclusion and employability); 3) enrich each other’s knowledge in complementary fields; 4) analyse the impact of ICT in a global world in a process of civilisational change (social, political, economic, and cultural). In a second moment the results achieved will contribute to shape the local implementation of good practices. Tangible and intangible results are expected. Among the tangible ones are: studies and reports, audio-visual materials, multimedia website, events, seminars, e-modules, MOOCs, ebooks… Intangible results will be, not only the increase of knowledge and experience in the areas dealt with by the project, but also the deepening of experience in the area of the digital instruments that will be built. Moreover, we intend to create new strategically partnerships on local and regional (in all countries) levels for future developments of the project. Besides, as long-term result we expect that this project will have long lasting impact on Science, Society, Technology and Policy areas. Especially in the Policy area, a report will be sent to the Ministries of Education and Science, the Network of Higher Education Reform Experts (HEREs), Vocational Education and Training (VET) entities and employment agencies. In the technology area, the impact will consist of the interoperability among the various academic institutions and the enterprises. As for Society, the fulfilment of the various courses and actions will promote equity and inclusion for people with educational difficulties or with social and geographical constraints. Finally, as for the scientific impact, papers and articles will be written to make this experience known in the academic field.
According to Eurostat, in 2013 one in every three Portuguese has never used the Internet. Portugal is the fifth country with the highest percentage of people in this situation (33%), preceded by Romania (42%), Bulgaria (41%), Greece (36%) and Italy (35%). On the other hand Denmark and Sweden have the lowest, both with 4%. The average in the 28 EU member countries is 21%. This project addressed this problem by engaging synergies of 7 partners in 4 countries (Portugal, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany) whose good practices were shared and validated by the Science and Technology Foundation. This network worked both at local, regional, national and international levels in transversal and trans-sectorial areas, both in terms of the partners involved (academic and enterprise), and in terms of the focus group (VET; adult education with disadvantaged background; HEI with special focus on this group) literacy inclusion, re-qualification and employability. This project involved partners in a high collaborative team work that resulted in achievements to be proud. These went beyond the initial project proposal, especially boosted by the impact the project had in the stakeholders. This cohesive team even completed activities that were not eligible for funding and also promoted new activities that derived from the project development. Our team brought together their expertise and discussed actively all the phases of the project, starting by stating and collecting the knowledge available on the subject and also by developing a nowadays strong dissemination tool: a webpage, with the creation of a specific marketing image for the project (logo), RSS feed, and informational documents of the project; promotional videos to explain the project to the stakeholders and to the public. The continuous work of the team was fully accompanied by all members in 7 transnational meetings that took place in: Santarém (2015); Munich (2015); Rome (2016); Glasgow (2016); Rome (2017); Lisboa (2017); Lisboa (2017). The project also promoted 2 multiplier events to disseminate the work done to the society and to the stakeholders: the first was in Santarém (31st May 2016) and the second one in Lisbon (5th June 2017). The relation with the stakeholders have always been present with a strong relationship with, for instance, Rede Tic e Sociedade, which is devoted to promote the best practices for digital literacy inclusion in Portugal. The project built educational contents on the three digital e-skills levels (basic, intermediate, advanced) in multi-format (webpages, ebooks, MOOCs) and multilingual (English, Portuguese, German and Italian) forms. Although the training sessions were not funded, the team decided to prepare materials and to produce Pedagogical and Didactical Guidelines to provide to the stakeholders, in order be later used with the disadvantaged background citizens. Some training sessions with disadvantaged citizens (older people, refugees) took place with the partners from Scotland, Italy and Germany. A MOOC on employability was also created to help disadvantaged people to follow a direction in order to up skill their curriculum and to find a job. The activities and the work done was disseminated through the webpages, the multiplier events and the produced and presented papers in national and international fora. The recognition of the work developed in this project came through the National Science Foundation Agency that invited the project coordinator to participate in the Portugal INCODE 2030 initiative panel, on the axis “Inclusion”, in order to promote and present the project, at the event Ciência 2017, which is the annual meeting of the Portuguese science and technology community. Finally, we would like to enhance the longer-term benefits of this project. All the materials produced for this project were regionally adapted for each partner country into 4 different languages (English, portuguese, german and Italian) and are freely available to be used in the formation of the disadvantaged population in training sessions. The recent (September 2017) report of the group of the Working Group of Education from UNESCO on “Digital Skills for life and work” states that “Even the lives of people who do not have access to digital technology are increasingly dependent on it.”. So, their recommendations to the policy makers and to the stakeholders reinforce the urgent need of ensuring digital literacy for all, through national formation initiatives to all the population, with a particular focus on the “out-of-school children and those without basic digital skills” , “disadvantaged groups irrespective of gender, age, race or disability”, “illiterate or unemployed adults”. As far as we can understand our project is completely aligned with the recommendations from UNESCO, providing digital literacy contents and strategies to training sessions that allow for a widespread formation on e-skills.