Open Your Eyes: Fake News for Dummies Erasmus Project

Project Title

Open Your Eyes: Fake News for Dummies

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

In the New Media Age and in this pandemic situation we are constantly surrounded by all kinds of information, from political issues to advertisements and marketing, which gets to us with no filter other than our own capacity to critically assess its validity. The Open Your Eyes project targets specifically adult learners and educators and seeks to improve their digital skills by providing them with tools to identify fake news and fight the spread of disinformation online. In 2020 when the situation in the whole world change we decided to upgrade the project aim and results and make more in order to be up to date and follow the changing situation with the pandemic.
The “Open Your Eyes” project addresses directly a lack of critical thinking skills found in society to read, understand, contrast and evaluate the information as well as the ability to analyze the way you think and present evidence for your ideas, rather than simply accepting personal reasoning as sufficient proof. The project supports improving digital literacy of adult learners which are implemented through exploration of news feeds and building up digital source criticism, i.e. the skills of adults/adult learners of identifying the values and principles
underlying media texts and discriminating objective from subjective information.
The Open Your Eyes project deliver the following main results:
“Check IT Out” Database: after thorough comparative research, the partners compiled a collection of best practices and initiatives that enables users to develop a critical approach to news consumption and trigger their critical sense towards this issue. Research were conducted in a selection of European countries interested by phenomena such as separatism and rising disinformation, particularly around the time of national and European elections, and allow users to design individual strategies to confront disinformation based on what worked best in other countries. In 2020 we collected and described known methods to create fake news and Internet-based resources for fact checking across Europe connected with tools and instruments fightind disinformation connected with COVID-19.
A 3 days face-to-face training for adult educators in English were developed and held. After the training, the participants developed the methodology and a handbook (in English and in partner languages) for the “Check it out” Labs, that held in partner countries. The “Check IT Out” Labs: In order to support digital literacy of adults, there created a database of good practices and initiatives used in different EU countries relating to news which were customized to partner countries and tested in “Check IT Out” Labs by adult learners and adult educators. This “Check IT Out” Labs support adults in developing their critical and digital skills, bringing them closer to the concept of fake news and ultimately spreading awareness about the topic within their network.
Due to COVID-19 pandemic the partnership consortium created Tips for adult educators make online teaching fun and engaging for your check it out lab. Our partners consortium decide to create those tips, because the pandemic caused most teaching activities, including classes for adults, to be shifted to an online environment. This resulted in a considerable challenge for adult educators, faced with making online teaching fun and engaging for adult learners. Nonetheless, a few useful tips can always come in handy to give an extra boost to learners’ motivation and to support educators in improving their teaching strategy, learning new skills, and embracing a brand new approach.
Needless to mention, the principles in the Tips for adult educators are valid for teaching a class on any kind of subject, not only disinformation, and some key principles are also applicable in classroom-based learning.
It is worthy to emphasize the importance of the project carried out transnationally so that to introduce those initiatives on tackling disinformation and tackling fake news that have a larger, transnational scope to educational community and, within a communication campaign and forum – to policy-makers, join efforts and good practices of EU stakeholders and transfer the
knowledge and experience around Europe.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 206544 Eur

Project Coordinator

NIKANOR LTD & Country: BG

Project Partners

• LIFELONG LEARNING PLATFORM
• EU DISINFOLAB
• UPI – ljudska univerza Zalec
• Associacio Programes Educatius Open Europe
• Agentia pentru Dezvoltare Regionala Nord-Est
• European Digital Learning Network