Home Based Care – Home Based Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Home Based Care – Home Based Education

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 adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning

Project Summary

Context: The population of Europe is getting older. As the propensity to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or other dementias increases with age, the number of people who will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or other dementias is set to increase in the foreseeable future. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s or other dementias. The provision of care to people with dementia is costly to states around Europe. Home based care is seen as highly effective and desirable by key stakeholders and by people who have dementia. We strongly believe that ways need to be found to promote the provision of home based care by family members of loved ones with dementia. Many conventional face to face courses exist around Europe. And there are a range of Online courses too.

Objectives: We will develop a high quality training course based on an existing and popular face to face course for family carers of loved ones with dementia. This will require the production of two intellectual outputs as follows: 1. the development of a physical Online course structure and materials which will be available to organizations working with family carers 2. these organizations will require a set of Guidelines which we are calling the Quality Framework User’s Guide and which will provide information, advice and practical plans which will enable them to facilitate this course for their service users.

Participants Profile: 30 family carers will benefit from this grant while 76 participants will come from the three beneficiary organisations the Alzheimer Society of Ireland (ASI) , Fleksibel udtanning Norge (FuN) and IC Dien, Belgium. Direct participants in this project will include training staff from The Alzheimer Society of Ireland (11 people), Online teaching and learning experts from FuN in Norway (2 people), lecturers at IC Dien a further education college in Belgium (3 people). Together these participants will use their expertise to build course content (Ireland and Belgium), place the course Online (Ireland and Norway), develop the User Guide for organizations (Norway and Ireland). All participant organizations will take part in a TTL (for 10 members) around facilitation of Online Learning groups – which is extremely important in running participatory Online programmes.

Description of Activities: The production of the Online course will involve the following tasks: a)identifying appropriate Learning Outcomes, b) Writing course content, c) Agreeing a set of learning activities, d) Agreeing Online structure, e) checking the Online course for Accessibility criteria and, f) Developing Evaluation processes. The production of the Guidelines will involve a) Assessment of the existing face-to-face course materials, b) Defining what we mean by “Quality”, c) creating the checklist for each quality criteria, d) Writing an Online Teaching Guide, e) Implementing the Quality Framework into the Pilot Course Design.

Our overall project methodology will be based on Honey and Mumford’s 4 stage Learning Cycle. The result of the project will be a freely available, high quality and easily usable Online course for family members of people with dementia, together with a User’s Guide for organizations working with this target group across Europe.

Results and Impact: We would expect 30 family carers to have received a quality Online training experience during the project, leading to a more confident and skilled set of family carers. In addition, we would expect 15 organisations to sign up to using the Quality Framework User’s Guide at the Dissemination Conference in June 2017 and at the Alzheimer Europe conference in October 2016. The impact of the Online course will be measured using a ‘before and after’ questionnaire which will demonstrate the additional skills and knowledge participants have gained as a result of their training. Results will be contained in an academic paper to be peer reviewed and published Online.

Longer term benefits – a higher level of dementia care in the home / community, a greater likelihood for care organisations to deliver Online training courses and a greater general understanding of the demands of running quality assured courses.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 54613 Eur

Project Coordinator

The Alzheimer Society of Ireland & Country: IE

Project Partners

• Fleksibel utdanning Norge
• HBO IC DIEN VZW