Transnational Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills Erasmus Project

Project Title

Transnational Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills -TRENDSS Project was brought to life as a prompt response to the digital shift in educational paradigms generated by the pandemic. The Scientific Foresight Unit (STOA) of the European Parliamentary Research Service has just carried out studies recently that analyze current and future threats related to a digital society, alongside currently adopted socio-technical and legal approaches. The studies show the preoccupation of the EU Parlament about the issue and the need to develop an innovative approach to the online education problem. Digital society is a new problem and the solutions will be innovations in training, learning and educational materials.

The Transnational Consortium of the TRENDSS project consists of 6 partner organizations from Hungary, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Romania and Georgia, and they are all experienced actors in adult education (trainers, coaches, mentors, teacher trainers, professors, youth workers training young adults and support staff).
The members of the consortium has already established practices of working both face-to-face and online to share knowledge, good practices, experiment, receive feedback and support each other as a community.

The novelty of the TRENDSS project lies in its integrated approach of recognizing the need for different pedagogical approaches in the digital era and by instantly responding to the current issues in the educational paradigm shift by focusing on an area of its members’ expertise: the soft skills development.
By leveraging on the opportunities of the situation our project offers complex solutions for all the detected problems we recognized currently:
The TRENDSS project could be described along with the following questions:

-Why is TRENDSS needed?
Due to the pandemic context, as explained in detail above, the only education form is digital education nowadays. It means the world of education will never be the same as it was before.
The new situation requires new approaches and new solutions
One of our outputs is a longitudinal study on the changes in education. We are going to research the trends and recommend strategic steps for educators to prepare.

– What is needed?
We believe a new approach is needed. It is not enough to be digitally literate but we also need to develop and use soft skills in education in a different way than before.
Therefore, we will provide Comparative Methodological Guidelines to define and describe important soft skill competencies for digital instruction. These are transferable skills from face-to-face classrooms to digital classrooms. By elaborating on the framework we can set goals to be achieved by a competent digital trainer.
In addition, our Ethical guidelines will also provide a new norm and define what is ethical and what is not in the digital context.

– How can we get there?
To reach the level of a competent and ethical trainer we need practice. TRENDSS is creating two practical e-learning modules: Demo videos of good practices and the Survival kit for Trainers in the Digital World. Both intellectual outputs aim at providing hands-on, easy, engaging ideas and good practices.
However, to put everything in perspective, we also need to organize all these elements into a framework: The Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills is a complex e-solution platform with a lot of structured, engaging and gamified interactive exercises that could effectively help the trainers to walk the upskilling path in soft skill development.

– Who is coming with us?
As a consortium based on past common experience (as we are all trainers who participated in a trainer event ) we also believe that communities are important – especially today in the times of social distancing, when digital communication may be the only way to interact – and we would like to fill the gap for trainers and design the concept of Collaboration and Networking for educators of adult learners. We will elaborate on a theoretical framework and will invite international trainers and educators for big-scale international Multiplier events to be part of a collaborating community and network.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 211929 Eur

Project Coordinator

Yes You Can Training & Coaching Kft. & Country: HU

Project Partners

• Helix – Social Innovation Hub
• NON FORMAL EDUCATION YOUTH CENTRE SUNNY HOUSE
• Udruga Delta
• Fundacja Culture Shock
• NEA