BEST Institute for vocational training and personal training GmbH

STARTUP

Intelligent training needs assessment and open educational resources to foster entrepreneurship

Background

Entrepreneurship is considered to be a very important key competence by the European Commission, especially in these times of economic downturn. Today, only a minor part of the ICT potential for supporting innovative pedagogical developments and acquisition of key competences has been implemented in the lifelong learning sector. The STARTUP project therefore aims at developing and analysing an innovative pedagogy and assessment approach, based on Open Educational Resources (OER), to support diverse individual learning pathways and to better assess all types of learning outcomes and future learning needs related to entrepreneurship competences.

Our innovative method is based on a multilingual online environment, where individual learning needs of users meet selected and specified contents, learning objects, collected from the available Open Education Resources repositories in an easy, effective and quick way. The environment merges different existing technologies, such as expert systems and open source software, to set up a WEB community with the aim to provide the users with a customized training path based on their own learning style, specific needs, learning outcomes and the most effective digitised materials offered for free. The online peer to peer community is the place where all users can evaluate the Open Education Resources, share information and opinion about how to use, customize and finally reuse the contents.

 

Aims and target groups

The main project objective is the establishment of an innovative method for evaluating individual users’ learning needs to develop entrepreneurship, providing effective resources, and setting up a peer review and sharing community to ensure the quality of the contents.

The project target groups comprise educators, students and self-learners without any restriction neither in terms of sector, school, higher education and vocational education nor in terms of users’ age (young and adult people) and role, i.e. learners/teachers/researchers.

 

Outcomes

  • The project provides appropriate training paths for school level; school teachers and students are to be considered as potential target groups, as requested by the Comenius sub-programme.
  • According to the Erasmus objectives, OER will be available for tertiary level teachers and students as well.
  • The Leonardo da Vinci objectives will also be pursued, by supporting participants in training activities in the acquisition and the use of knowledge, skills and qualifications to facilitate personal development, employability and participation in the European labour market.
  • Also Grundtvig objectives will be taken into proper consideration. As OER are accessible also to informal and non-formal users, the project will provide adults with instruments enabling them to improve their knowledge and competences. Furthermore, the project will assist people from vulnerable social groups and in marginal social contexts, in order to give them alternative opportunities to access adult education.
EU-Program: LLP, KA3 Multilateral projects
Coordination: SOPHia In Action Consulting (Italy)
Contact: Karin Kronika
Duration: January 2013 – August 2015
EU - Partner für lebenslanges Lernen

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.