CREATOR: Experiential Approach to Teaching Entrepreneurship through Workplace Learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

CREATOR: Experiential Approach to Teaching Entrepreneurship through Workplace Learning

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 : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The CREATOR project aims at fostering entrepreneurship education through workplace learning in the light of The Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. Conceptually CREATOR puts a special emphasis on further strengthening entrepreneurship as one of the key competency in VET curricula and provides more effective work-based opportunities to acquire entrepreneurship competency in I-VET. In other words, we emphasize that teaching entrepreneurship by creating business plans and virtual companies cannot be fully comprehensive without strong cooperation with business organization, which can offer students real life entrepreneurial cases.
As a result of growing environmental dynamism more and more VET institutions are willing to look for new opportunities for sustainable cooperation with world of work. Close cooperation with world of work benefit students, teachers and companies. The guiding principle of the CREATOR project is to provide evidence based experiential teaching model proposal to ensure long-term sustainable cooperation between VET providers and local business organisations.
The overall aim of the CREATOR project is to implement experiential workplace based model of teaching entrepreneurship in VET in order to facilitate more frequent and quality cooperation between VET providers and local business organizations. The main aims of the CREATOR project are to:
– Introduce a new model of teaching entrepreneurship by working on real life cases in business and industry
– Deliver new entrepreneurship training material for teachers and students to support work based learning about entrepreneurship
– Equip VET teachers with skills for coaching and guiding students towards entrepreneurship
– Support cooperation between VET providers and local business towards offering more experience for developing entrepreneurial competencies of VET students
– Strengthen cooperation between VET providers and local business for creative solutions and product developments by joint work between students, teachers and local business
Project outputs will be strongly practical oriented, offering a comprehensive support for long term impact on experiential teaching of entrepreneurship. Specifically, the outcomes are the following:
– Publish teaching methodology for experiential teaching of entrepreneurship will serve as a guideline document for implementation of experiential teaching of entrepreneurship based on close cooperation with local business. A document will assist VET providers and VET policy makers.
– Publish teaching material for teachers and learning workbook for students will serve as manuals to support work based learning of entrepreneurship. Manuals will be published in 5 different languages.
– Publish compendium of prototypes will collect all entrepreneurial projects with solutions which will be based on pilot workplace entrepreneurship trainings of VET students.
– Publish evidence based study of effects of experiential teaching of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial competencies of VET teachers and students.
In addition, project outcomes encompass teaching activities, which will result in:
– Trained 11 VET teacher trainers
– Trained 60 VET teachers
– Trained 120 VET students
Short-term impact will be evident from increased sense of initiative and entrepreneurship of VET students and teachers measured by our study, better skills for employability of VET students, new opportunities for professional development of VET teachers, synergies and links between VET providers and local businesses, and better awareness in experiential approach to teaching entrepreneurship among VET teachers and policy makers.
Long-term impact will result in VET training that is better aligned to the needs of and opportunities offered by the local businesses, improved provision of transversal entrepreneurship skills, and better understanding of interconnections between formal, non-formal education, vocational training, and other forms of learning and labour market.
Due to the sustainable nature of the CREATOR project results all the innovative methodologies and user-friendly tools may be easily implemented in VET organizations across Europe.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 201667,79 Eur

Project Coordinator

Werkstatt-Berufskolleg Unna & Country: DE

Project Partners

• ilmiolavoro srl
• STEP Institut, zavod za psihologijo dela in podjetnistvo
• I.I.S. “Di Poppa-Rozzi”
• BHV d.o.o.
• GEPS Piran
• LICEUL TEHNOLOGIC ELECTROMURES
• Plattform e.V.