'E-Academy of Building Trades - E-learning Platform of Traditional Craftsmanship' is a transnational project answering the great need for new, innovative approaches in the education of the craftsmanship related to traditional building methods. The partnership is made of university faculties, adult education providers of building professions, non-governmental organisations being active in the heritage sector and an architectural design studio with the common aim to assemble new, digital type of learning materials helping to revive and maintain these professions as lifetime occupations. The project primarily targets young people and low-skilled or low-qualified adults, offering them an online accessible, open-access distant learning educational platform that hosts training courses of disappearing architectural professions. The series of shortfilms teach practical skills, hands-on expertise in a structured and illustrative way, providing easily perceivable knowledge for the learners who can be part of a virtual learning community, interacting with the providers of the tutorials and with other students, filling tests about the topics of the courses and receiving certificates at the end of each successful training. The e-learning platform is designed in a way to be able to host further training courses after the project's lifetime, being open for further partners, stakeholders and contributors with identical aims. The learning resources can later be combined with any practical trainings, workshop activities to strengthen the effectiveness of the gained knowledge, skills and competences. The learning modules can be also integrated to existing trainings of adult education or VET providers or even to special maintenance programmes which help the homeowners to take care of their properties on their own. To help all these initiatives special guidance materials will be assembled to facilitate the continuous further extension of the online academy and to ease the implementation of the video courses to the curricula of the different training institutions throughout Europe. Additionally to the realisation of the project outputs the European Festival of Traditional Building Trades will be organised in all partner countries to popularise the results and the craftsmanship essential for maintaining monument buildings and for the continuation of sustainable architectural solutions for the benefit of the future generations.
The consortium planned to assemble an online platform that allows access to training courses using illustrative and demonstrative digital media contents in the form of video tutorials combined with interactive testing possibilities. The enrolment for the courses is open to everyone without any fee and the opportunity is continuously promoted through different channels. The project had to provide innovative learning materials of high quality, containing video tutorials, that focuses on the hands of the masters of these professions. Due to the open-access feature, the online form and the cross-platform compatibility the planned e-learning platform should be ideal for distant learning regardless of any aspects. The illustrative and attractive form arriving from the video tutorial solution had to give an easy entry level for the learners to quickly learn a lot of important basics of the selected trades and crafts. This can be a highly important factor in attracting low-skilled or low-qualified adults.
Consortium of ‘E-Academy of Building Trades’ is concerned about the future of the traditional building trades which are cruically indispensable to the proper maintenance and honest restorations of monuments and old buildings. Traditional building technologies also offer sustainable green solutions with low carbon emission compared to modern methodologies, while also contributing to the preservation of the authentic image of rural areas. Therefore the partnership decided to assemble new learning materials to ensure the continuity of these traditional trades and the living form of this sort of craftsmanship. The Moodle platform created through the programme now offers distant learning possibility with free and easy access with the solution of a Moodle e-learning platform. The main media used was video tutorials which were organised into courses on 12 trades, pairing them with multilingual subtitles and text-form descriptions. The tutorial videos are accessible through the Moodle platform and the Youtube channel of the programme and also partly through the Facebook page dedicated to the project. Two further handbooks help the educational usage and the further extension of the platform while popularising the selected trades.