EuroMELEC: European Mates of ELECtricity Erasmus Project

Project Title

EuroMELEC: European Mates of ELECtricity

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Recognition, transparency, certification; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

The European labour market is constantly evolving.
Young people arriving on this labour market must be adaptable. They must have real professional skills and be autonomous. Above all, they must be open-minded.

On the other side, in our schools, especially in the vocational departments, young people are often coming from the lower or middle socio-professional categories. In their everyday life, they are often facing situations that are a real brake for their educational success.
That’s why, it’s the role of our School to provide them the opportunity to reach the EU labour market with abilities & skills that match with its needs, whatever their background is.

This is the idea of the EuroMELEC project. The « European Mates of ELECtricity » project implies 5 electricity departments, 5 vocational high schools and 5 EU countries (France, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Slovenia). This EU team of electricity teachers and EU project coordinators will propose to the students of their electricity departments (from 25 to 75 students, depending on the schools) to give a EU scope to their training, with the view to later create a EU electricity course.

Through the project, students groups will do various parts of their (2 to 3-year-and-a-half) training with their peers. All the planned activities are part of their curricula (an advantage), but in addition to doing this « at home » in their mother tongue, they will carry out some of them in English with their peers. For example, between the mobilities they will do researches related to the production of electrical energy, to the prevention of electrical hazards or to the refurbishing of an electrical system to make it more eco-friendly,… but instead of « only » doing this at the local level, they will do that with their peers, working online thanks to synchronous or asynchronous working sessions, with the view to go further together and thus improve the final results.
During the one-week mobilities, students will work on practical activities in the workshop of their counterparts: for example, choosing the components and cabling an industrial board, programming an automaton, preparing electrical diagrams, doing electrical maintenance tasks,… Tasks will depend on the content of the electricity/electrotechnics curricula in each of our countries.
Once again, things will be done together. As the African proverb says: « If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together! »
We definitely want to go far… and take our students further. That’s why we are doing this together!

It will give an outstanding opportunity to our students to improve their professional skills as well as their cross-cutting or social skills. They will develop their EU citizenship, their language and communication skills and learn from each other. Above all, they will enhance their open-mindedness, a key competence in nowadays labour market. They will be more motivated, ambitious and all of this will lead to an increased employability.
Teachers will also largely benefit from the project. They will share their knowledge and specificities and learn from others practices. They will teach parts of their subject in English. They will open their mind and create a real EU-network of electricity teachers.

A real-scale test of the ECVET system will also be done along the project.
Most of our curricula are divided in subjects and skills, we will allocate a certain amount of credits to each subject/skill, depending on their weight in our curricula. And students will acquire credits abroad, that will be recognized for their final assessment in their own country, that’s the ECVET system.
This system is correctly implemented in some of our countries (eg. Sweden) but doesn’t work properly in some others (eg. France). So, the EuroMELEC project will also count a joint staff training event on the ECVET system and will be a lab to test this recognition system with the view to later embed this more widely within our educational systems with the support of our authorities.
So, the project is innovative for students, teachers and for educational authorities.

As tangible results, the project will count a project website with all the evidences, a Twinspace and a mobile app. for teachers to assess the acquired skills or credits.

In addition to this KA229 project, member schools will also exchange their students for longer vocational training sessions in companies through KA102 projects, the short-term KA229 mobilities being a preparation for the longer, which is often needed for our students.

Finally, we think that doing this project with electricity departments is particularly relevant regarding the Europe 2030 climate and energy framework, adopted by the European Council in 2014 and revised in 2018. Indeed, energy consumptions and climate changes are a global concern, that’s why « reducing energy consumptions and designing energy-efficient installations » will be a guiding light along the EuroMELEC project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 157687 Eur

Project Coordinator

Lycée Léonard de Vinci & Country: FR

Project Partners

• The Upper-Secondary School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Technical Gymnasium Ljubljana
• AEVA – ASSOCIACAO PARA A EDUCACAO E VALORIZACAO DA REGIAO DE AVEIRO
• Åtvidabergs kommun
• Berufskolleg des Kreises Olpe