The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many areas of peoples lives in Europe and around the world, limiting the possibility for human interaction and moving many professional and civic activities to the online sphere. Building on the Europe@School programme, The project "Europe@Home: European Civic Education through the mobile" aims at examining and developing further the practices of digital education that have been put in place in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, focusing especially on european civic education. The objectives of the project are: To examine the opportunities for the implementation of European Civic Education through online educational platforms and study the approaches that different youth organisations have taken to online education during the COVID-19 pandemics and similar challenges in the past. To adapt a set of existing European Civic Education tools for online use. To implement online European Civic Education activities at the local level in coordination with activities at the European level and collect lessons learnt. To offer space for learning and networking between different youth organisations from the local to European level. These objectives will be achieved using a mix of desk research, online and offline activities. In the first stage of the project, the consortium will map the approaches used by different youth organisations to carry out European Civic education online, especially in the recent months. During an expert meeting, these practices will be examined and adapted for use with the existing Europe@School resources developed by JEF Europe and its sections during the 20 years of the programme implementation. Subsequently, young educators will be trained in the use of the digital tools in order to test them at the local level and collect feedback. Finally, the outcomes will be presented to external stakeholders at a closing conference, which will be also an opportunity to develop wider partnerships for the dissemination of the project outcomes. Overall, the consortium plans involve approximately 300 youth activists and educators during online and offline events and 10,000 indirectly, using the developed online tools. The core results, including the Europe@Home manual and skills developed by youth educators and ‘multipliers’ will continue their impact long after the project closure. Adding a new digital dimension to Europe@School, they will serve as pillars for the continuous implementation of the programme by national and local sections of JEF Europe, partner organisations and interested stakeholders. The strategic partnership as part of the project will gather different organisations active at the European, national and local level, including partners who worked together in the past as well as new ones in order to exchange expertise in the subject area of the project. The participating organisations are youth-focused and youth-led, targeting their members, affiliated trainers and educators as well as other youth activists willing to support the broadest possible outreach of the project from the European to local level.
The project "Europe@Home: European Civic Education through the mobile" aimed to examine and further develop the digital education practices that have been put in place in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, with a particular focus on European Civic Education. The objectives of the project were: -To examine the opportunities for the implementation of European Civic Education through online educational platforms and study the approaches taken by different youth organisations during the COVID-19 pandemics and similar challenges in the past. This was to be done by means of desk research and an empirical study addressing youth organisations all over Europe, reflecting on the learnings to derive at useful conclusions. - To adapt a set of existing and create new non-formal European Civic Education tools for online use and create new activities to educate young persons on different European topics and issues. - To implement online European Civic Education activities at the local level in coordination with activities at the European level and collect lessons learnt, implementing them into the manual. - To offer space for learning and networking between different youth organisations from the local to European level.
The COVID-19 pandemic affected many aspects of people's lives in Europe, especially young people and youth organisations, who could not carry out most of their activities, and therefore their missions. However, young people have shown a real capacity to adapt to the online format by using new tools and platforms. Despite this, it soon became apparent that the implementation of online activities required real facilitation skills and careful consideration of the objectives, opportunities and constraints that the online format might have for the implementation of non-formal education activities. This is why the consortium decided to gather existing resources on digital education, in particular regarding European civic education, from and for young people. In addition of this research work, a survey was also carried out to highlight good practices in terms of use of digital tools. Furthermore, based on a multi-level and transnational approach through the different seminar and training activities, the consortium developed a toolkit with 20 online tools, ready to be implemented, as well as guidelines and a facilitation methodology for conducting and facilitating an online activity with young people within the Europe@School programme.