Through this project we intend to provide critical skills of using Internet and other skills that are nowadays compulsory for an active and responsible digital citizen. Such skills will be useful not for a short period, but also for lifelong learning and employability, as all of them are listed among the required skills the employers are looking for even after 2020. (World Economic Forum (The Future of Jobs, 2018, Report), Eures (The top ICT skills in demand by companies today, 2019) etc.) Through YNSPEED (Youth new personal & employable skills development) project we will address 3 hot topic of the nowadays digital era such us: fake news, artificial intelligence and education for a sustainable development + a continuous interesting & useful topic as learning English, this time by using technologies. Through the project will be implemented a MOOC platform for courses addressing (critical) digital & media literacy (Fake News), Artificial Intelligence, Sustainable Development and Learning English with Technology. Thus, 250 youth workers & youth aged 16-35 that are willing to develop & improve such skills skills could attend MOOCs that are addressing hot topics for the nowadays digital society. By finalizing such courses they can obtain diplomas that are nowadays already informally recognized by some employers (another long-term aim of the project is to make efforts for validating such kind of informally acquired competencies) fostering youths' employability, too. Thus, the YNSPEED project addresses open&innovative practices for informal learning using digital platforms, tools&materials. Aims and objectives The YNSPEED project aims to address open and innovative practices for informal learning through which the young people from 5 partner countries in the project are aware of the learning process and develop specific skills that will improve their employment skills such as: critical thinking about fake news, approach and education for sustainable development using digital platforms, tools and materials. The specific objectives of the project that are planned to be achieved over a period of 2 years are: - to equip the youth workers and the disadvantaged youth from the 5 communities involved in the project with knowledge relevant to their professional and personal life and to improve their employable skills, over a period of 24 months - to prepare the young people from the 5 communities of the project consortium for lifelong learning, involving them in a process of operationalizing the critical thinking skills regarding fake news, addressing artificial intelligence and education for sustainable development in the a digital company for a period of 24 months -to design and validate training tools and materials that promote innovation in learning (ie LET course) with flexible approaches (ie MOOC) that will be used within the partnership for direct target groups - youth workers and youth in disadvantaged areas from those 5 communities involved in the project, over a period of 24 months. Therefore, youth workers will be prepared to increase the level of self-empowerment or self-development and, more importantly, develop the level of adjustment to new social and economic context. How will we measure the degree of attainment of these objectives: -we will develop new tools to be used for the development and support of the critical thinking - we will centralize the reactions direct and indirect will have towards these tools - we will measure the degree of interest for the project coming from the stakeholders in the filed As concrete results, through this project we will produce: - An online platform suitable for running MOOC courses + 4 MOOC courses (developed under CC licences, using partially OER resources that could be easily transfer and adapt to other users/learners) - 5 Multiplier dissemination events/conferences - 2 short training courses for youth's workers + a youth's learning strategy - national policy recommendation for validation of informally acquired competencies through MOOC courses The consortium's transnational nature with different types of organizations allows to assess different EU situations; to bring and share multiple learning experiences and scenarios. This multinational teamwork draws a more comprehensive approach to the needs and solutions, bringing the projects' benefits in the different stages of implementation in terms of interventions & results' quality.
The specific objectives of the project that was planned to be achieved over a period of 3 years was: - to equip the youth workers and the disadvantaged youth from the 5 communities involved in the project with knowledge relevant to their professional and personal life and to improve their employable skills, over a period of 30 months - to prepare the young people from the 5 communities of the project consortium for lifelong learning, involving them in a process of operationalizing the critical thinking skills regarding fake news, addressing artificial intelligence and education for sustainabel development in the a digital society for a period of 30 months -to design and validate training tools and materials that promote innovation in learning (ie LET course) with flexible approaches (ie MOOC) that was used within the partnership for direct target groups - youth workers and youth in disadvantaged areas from those 5 communities involved in the project, over a period of 30 months
The project is aligned with the horizontal priority of National Agency Call 2019, i.e social inclusion, as the project aims at offering solutions in terms of needed employable skills for youth aged 16-35, including those with some disabilities or facing cultural differences, economic, geographical and social obstacles as well as educational difficulties. In addition to that, as the nature of the project is partially distance/online learning, so it is especially suited to face youth and youth workers from different cultures (incl. immigrants/foreign language speakers) and geographical and social obstacles and also for some of them that have educational difficulties. Moreover, as among the subjects covered are digital specific skills as critical digital literacy (fake news, misinformation and disinformation and other related transdisciplinary digital skills as well-being, digital communication, digital collaboration etc.) and the new-coming artificial intelligence skills, through this project open educational and innovative practices was address in order to prepare and equip youth and youth workers with new employable skills, needed for a digital era. Moreover, through this project, the youth and youth workers were familiarized with principles of sustainable development, also a necessity for proving the quality and efficiency of education and training of the nowadays youth systems and society. On the other hand, at the organizational level, there was a need for the participating organizations to improve techniques and skills for working with young people on this topic, but also to improve their digital skills to work on MOOCs, a new concept, and to to have the skills to develop other MOOCs on other topics, starting from the content projection phase, such as an adapted curriculum on a MOOC platform, to the choice of platforms that allow uploading a MOOC type course to the development of resources specific to an educational platform and its use in the educational process. The project was developed as a solution tailored to the development needs of some innovative learning tools used to develop and support critical thinking skills on fake news, artificial intelligence and education for sustainable development in a digital society, need expressed locally and regionally by youth workers and young people from partner countries and regions. Prior to the preparation of this project, each of the consortium partners organized focus groups (3 meetings/partners, 2 with youth workers and 1 with young people in the community) to discuss the need for developing skills acceptors, which support the development of all other skills needed to develop the level of adjustment to the new social and economic context in a digital society.