The majority of approaches targeting issues of intellectual disability (ID) are either focused on persons with the intellectual disability (PWID) or on professionals in an effort to equip them with appropriate educational and support strategies. The need to provide parents with necessary information and skills in order to better support their children with ID is often overlooked. Parents, though, play a significant part in supporting their children to become active members of the society and to have good quality of life. Through this project, organisations from 5 European countries will come together to produce an e-learning platform for parents with children with ID. The e-platform will contain 6 modules aiming at providing training, awareness raising and/or attitude change and they will be covering areas such as early intervention, improving communication, abuse awareness, stress management, transition to adulthood, sexuality, ageing etc. More specifically, at the beginning of the project, all partners will discuss and agree upon the 6 main areas. Then, a needs assessment study will be carried out in several European countries. At least 150 parents will take part in focus groups and/or fill in questionnaires in order to identify which aspects of each topic they would like the modules to cover. This will ensure that the content of all modules actually meets the needs of the parents. Then, FORTH and HIOA will organise a staff training where professionals from all participating partners will take part in order to exchange and obtain the necessary knowledge and skills regarding how to produce e-learning material. IB, Puzzle, EPA and CSB will then produce a module in the area of their expertise, whilst HIOA, who has more expertise in this area, will produce two modules and also be responsible for the quality control of all modules. All modules will be translated and made available in English, French, German, Greek, Danish and Norwegian making at accessible to many users. FORTH, as IT experts, will develop the platform and upload all material. The platform will be free and parents from several European countries will be informed about it in group meetings, taught how to use it and invited to complete the module(s) of their interest. Over 400 parents will complete at least one module, having a positive impact to PWID and their families. In order to be able to assess the effectiveness and impact of the teaching content and methods as demonstrated through the e-learning platform, questionnaires will be created that all users/parents will complete online before and after undertaking the module. The results of the research studies as well as the e-learning platform will be presented in the final event in Brussels, and the next steps will be discussed.
The implementation of differentiated educational programs for Persons With Intellectual Disabilities (PWID), as well as the quality of training for the professionals who support them, have traditionally been the main focus of policies aiming to enhance the social inclusion of PWID. Action-taking focusing on the parents' knowledge base has not received equal attention, despite the fact that it is widely recognized, that parents play a significant role in the life of their children. The ELPIDA project aimed to fill this gap by providing tailor made training to parents of PWID in order to enhance the support they provide to their children and enable them to positively influence the quality of their life. The project's overall goal was the empowerment of PWID to a better quality of life. The project concept is founded on the assumption that parental support is a key vehicle for improving the lives of persons with Intellectual Disability (ID) and on such a base set its goal to be the provision of parental support. In ELPIDA the provision of parental support takes the form of professionally developed learning resources accessible through a Learning Platform. The specific themes/topics addressed by the resources were defined through interaction between the project partners and persons with Intellectual Disability in the forms of focus group discussions and data gathering. The process concluded to a set of six thematic units which constitute the projects set of stand alone modules and address the themes of Human Rights, Communication, Stress Management, Transition to Adulthood, Sexual Health, Ageing. The drafting of the contents was driven by a learning objective perspective. The resources put in place feature multimedia elements and are supplemented with reflective questions for parents which in turn are addressed with rigorous evaluated contents. The six modules developed in Moodle can be followed/attended on a participants' preference order, each complemented with pre-post assessment tools. The set of modules and complemented features are accessible through the ELPIDA Learning Platform (http://www.elpida-project.eu/index.php/en/) which is available in seven linguistic versions (Danish, English, French, German, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese). The Platform has been used by approximately 400 parents and the up to date results suggest acceptance by the target group it is intended for. On interest is that the Platform, to a rather high degree, is accessed through mobile phones. The concepts embedded in the project concern and the outcomes of 24 months activity context implemented, besides the wide dissemination undertaken by the partnership (conferences, events, distribution of dissemination material, communication with parents and NGOs) having reached approximately 10.000 stakeholders, have also gained the acceptance of professionals in the area of care and policy through an Event hosted in the European Parliament. The latter gave rise to interest by large Associations whose sphere of activity addresses issues on ID. The project has also been honored to be selected as an example of good practice by the European Commission that published the project's results at the April's editorial of School Education Gateway, as well as to be shortlisted for an award by the Zero Project initiative. It is of interest that the learning resources have been assessed as being appropriate for university courses in social work and nursery.The partnership attended to the above in a highly collaborative manner and attests its interest to further pursue its efforts towards enhancing the learnability potential (with state-of- the- art resources) to parents and caretakers of persons with intellectual disability.