SOCIAL CONNECTIONS: TRAINERS FOR E-SOCIAL WORK Erasmus Project

Project Title

SOCIAL CONNECTIONS: TRAINERS FOR E-SOCIAL WORK

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

COVID-19 aggravated social exclusion of ill, older and disabled persons through measures to restrict movement and contacts, such as stay-at-home restrictions, quarantines, and lockdowns. While such measures were crucial for ensuring the safety of all, they just worsened and mainstreamed a condition of isolation that many groups of population suffered even before the pandemic.
Indeed, across Europe, millions of younger and older persons with mobility impairment due to illness, age or disability or with immunodeficiency are restrained every day, often together with their informal carers, in their opportunities of social interaction and engagement in meaningful activities outside their homes. Engaging clients in meaningful activities is one of the principles of Person-Centered Care and it has been found fundamental to the health and wellbeing of the individual accessing care and support. It can help to improve physical fitness, improve mood and help to combat depression and anxiety, combat loneliness, improve the quality of sleep and even reduce falls. (Skills for care) However, it can be challenging for housebound clients to access them if not supported in doing so.
As clearly showed during the peak of the pandemic, online technologies could be exploited to provide social support and a sense of belonging. However, not only many persons in Europe still have limited access to digital technologies and lack necessary skills to fully exploit them, but this is true also for many social care professionals and andragogists, who might not have the necessary competences to conceive and implement social support actions based on ICT. In fact, a barrier to e-social work is not only the lack of basic ICT skills, but rather of more advanced competences, such as the ability to access, adapt and create new social and educational intervention methods using ICTs and to deliver technology-mediated social work and community work practices. Also, the use of ICT raises specific issues in terms of ethics and privacy which must be dealt with.
In this framework, the specific goal of the SOCIAL CONNECTIONS project will be to develop digital pedagogical competences of C-VET educators in the social sector, enabling them to teach to their students how to develop and use high quality digital content for social inclusion of clients which are housebound because of disability, illness or COVID-19 related restrictions.
The expected tangible results of the projects are a handbook and a toolbox which will support trainers in VET and C-VET in the social sector to teach to their students how to develop and use high-quality digital content for social inclusion of clients which are housebound because of disability, illness or COVID-19 related restrictions and an e-learning course which the trainers themselves will develop as an outcome of a project-based learning activity and which students will be able to access to learn how to use ICT to engage their housebound clients in meaningful activities. These results are linked to the following outcomes:
IO1 – a handbook for trainers engaged in VET and CPD training courses for social professionals, upskilling them to be able to identify the challenges and the opportunities offered by e-social work and to plan and implement training curriculum to educate social professionals to the use of ICT in their work with clients who are housebound because of disability, illness or COVID-19 related restrictions.
IO2 – A “toolbox for e-social work”, i.e. a set of pedagogical activities that care professionals can implement with their users in a digital environment. These resources will be selected and explained to students by trainers participating in the training for trainers which will implement in practice the methodology described in IO1.
IO3 – An an e-learning course for the C-VET of social professionals on how to implement e-social work activities: the e-learning, developed by participants to the training for trainers as a result and practical implementation of what they learned, will then remain available as an open educational resource for social care workers across Europe.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 164150 Eur

Project Coordinator

FUNDACION INTRAS & Country: ES

Project Partners

• ANZIANI E NON SOLO SOCIETA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE
• APROXIMAR- COOPERATIVA DE SOLIDARIEDADE SOCIAL, CRL
• VIRTUAL CAMPUS LDA
• ASOCIATIA EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR SOCIAL INOVATION
• SOSU OSTJYLLAND