Radical Online Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Radical Online 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 youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Social dialogue

Project Summary

ROE’s main objective was to provide youth workers all the necessary knowledge and tools to help young people develop their critical thinking skills as many of them are exposed to radical propaganda and often make an improper use of internet. All youth workers reached from ROE are now able to provide positive online counter-narratives, recognizing online negative messages and encourage intercultural dialogue and personal exchanges between young people as a key method of building resilience to extremist propaganda.

The main target group of ROE were youth workers as well as ROE outcomes and outputs targeted youth workers and professionals working in the field of youth. Indeed, the “Needs and Challenges Analysis Report” report (A2), e-learning courses (IO1), the digital guide of best practices (IO2), the training event (C1), the several dissemination activities conducted both offline and online allowed ROE consortium to reach more than 2000 people. However, this number can be higher because it does not take in consideration the digital guide of best practices (IO2) (available in all partners languages) which was the final output of the project and have the potential to reach and be used by other people working in the field of youth.

Beyond the project management & implementation realized by partners, the following activities were undertaken:

1. Needs and Challenges Analysis Report (A2): This document was built using data collection through online questionnaires carried out in four countries, Denmark, Austria, Spain and Bulgaria. The main findings of the report were used to define the needs and challenges of youth workers regarding the digital and media literacy skills that they need in order to address the current youth radicalisation crisis in Europe. The results of the report were used for the elaboration of the e-learning courses (Output 1) of the project.

2. E-learning courses (IO1) and creation of Moodle online platform: All youth workers that taken the online courses achieved the following learning outcomes:
-Understand key definitions and current trends related to youth radicalization and violent extremism.
-Understand what makes youth vulnerable to radicalization.
-Get to know how to recognize the indicators that radicalization might be taking place and have a clear understanding of their responsibilities
-Learn how to build online counter-narrative and youth awareness programmes.

3. Training event (C1) which took place in Bansko (Bulgaria) between 24-29 June 2018. In the training participated youth workers coming from Bulgaria, Austria, Spain and Denmark. The idea of the training event was to share best practices regarding youth work and risk of marginalization and radicalization as well as:

-Raise awareness of the treats that social media tools have for youth at risk of radicalization and how youth workers can use them to traverse the language barrier and to tackle the threat of online extremism.
-Know and learn methods of use and management of social media for reaching out youth, thanks both to the comparison with the other participants to the best practices shown.

4. Digital Guide of best practice (IO2) (available in five languages): This output provides youth workers with updated knowledge, tools and examples of good practices in the field of preventing online radicalization. Thus, this guide gathered a useful set of guidelines, methods and case studies to be used by any youth worker interested in online de-radicalization.

5. Offline & online dissemination events which involved other youth workers and interested stakeholders.

Results and impact attained:

– The project was directly aimed to youth workers in the field of disadvantaged youth. They benefited from educational content to improve their management skills regarding to youth work.
– The youth workers benefited in terms of motivation, commitment, tools and methods. They now have a greater satisfaction in their volunteer commitment and perform better quality of youth work. Their level of skills improved and these skills will be also transferable to other volunteer engagements or even in the job market.
– Youth workers and other organizations staff involved in learning activities benefited from improved youth work: more committed and motivated youth workers, more consistency between regardless of youth workers involved in learning activities. This results in creating more impact in the awareness raising activities, improve learning impact, extended learning opportunities in the field of youth and eventually more sustainable results and impact of the activities.
– Organisations involved benefited from improve processes and results, therefore they optimized available resources for new activities such as tackling the radicalization of youth and new opportunities. The project aimed to contribute to sustainability and capacity building of the organizations that now can count on new OERs.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 59296 Eur

Project Coordinator

DANISH YOUTH TEAM & Country: DK

Project Partners

• SDRUZHENIE ALTERNATIVI INTERNATIONAL
• OESTERREICHISCHE JUNGARBEITERBEWEGUNG, OEJAB
• ASOCIACION PROJUVEN