Entering the labour market successfully when their schooling is finished is a challenge to young people all over Europe, especially if they are considered disadvantaged. The problem is not only visible in the economically weaker countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, but is also evident in all other countries. To address this problem, many countries in Europe introduced 'work-oriented training' methods (WBT) in schools and vocational training programs to create a better link between theory-based learning and practical training. This approach is more stimulating to these students and has shown to produce feelings of success for young learners whose skills and capabilities lie to a greater extend in practical work rather than abstract learning. Nowadays, it´s widely recognized that those countries with an integrated work-based vocational preparation and training system and an apprenticeship-oriented approach are doing better with the successful transition from school to work. However, the national transition settings differ from country to country. Furthermore, regardless the national institutional system may be, the same challenge has to be faced everywhere: how to combine theory learning and practice training efficiently in order to produce sustainable learning success with disadvantaged young people.This in fact was the main focus of the WBT strategic partnership. The aim was to discover and examine the various work-based training approaches being used in European countries and to find out 'what works', striving to disseminate good practices and approaches. The overall aim was to find successful ways and strategies for overcoming long standing learning barriers and blockades in order to create sustainable learning success and to secure the successful integration of young students into the labour market.At first, the partnership researched the different transition settings and WBT approaches in the partner countries and illustrated the findings in an overview report. Following, an Online Survey was carried out, addressed to the main relevant stakeholders involved in school-to-work transition: teachers, trainers/instructors and the young learners themselves. The interviews were done through an online questionnaire containing a mix of standardized and open questions. The aim was to find out what were the great advantages of the respective WBT approach in the country; what were the drawbacks; and what kind of improvements can be identified. The online survey collected around 20 interviews from each stakeholder group in each country, producing more than 560 interviews in total. The online survey was evaluated in a Report on Findings and finally lead, as the core product, to a Manual on Work-based Training that illustrates the different approaches of WBT, documents the findings of the survey, and details best practices-by providing descriptions of demonstrative examples.

The VETIVER project had the main objective to provide innovative and efficient learning experiences for VET students. The objective has been reached thanks to the great collaboration among partners, as most of them had already work together and have a high level of understanding. Besides partners, some external organisations were involved, mainly VET schools, plus some secondary schools and one University. The total number of external organisations involved is of 39.The main objectives of the project was the creation of a digital environment to promote quality alerting and blended learning, together with the creation of OERs to be used in VET and for teacher training. Both objectives were accomplished:1. Vetiver Environment is composed of LMS (Moodle) and ePortfolio (Mahara) and an educational repository also available using a mobile app.In fact there are 2 different instances of the LMS (http://vetiver.4eclass.net/ and https://www.vetiver-lms.hu/) where the 18 courses developed, 3 for teacher training and 15 for VET students, all of them available in the 5 languages of the project.Other important developments related with the repository, are an educational taxonomy and a multilingual thesaurus. Both of them provides the required metadata and controlled vocabularies to the repository, and allow more significative searching in the repository. The repository has been populated with more than 500 resources and is freely available from the project website (http://vetiverproject.eu/repository)Creating OERs was another of the key objectives of the project. There, the project has created a total of 280 OERs in SCORM format, which allows to use them directly in your own LMS, and all of them can be downloaded from the website. There are 10 for teacher training in all the languages, what makes a total of 50 teacher training SCORMs. The rest 230 are resources in different subjects, like Entrepreneurship, ICT, Interior Design or Furniture creation for VET students. All the SCORM resources were developed using Adobe CaptivateOther main developments of the project were the following reports, all of them available in the five languages of the project:Vetiver Handbook: available also as flipbook in the website, the handbook provides the more “technical” information about the project environment. This will allow any technical coordinator in a school to replicate the project environment.Itineraries Report: coming up with learning itineraries in a project like this one there is a necessity to organize all the educational resources, so the students can have better learning performances. The report deals with new emerging theories which tell us how importance of the communication between students of an online course is, together with the capacity of building their own personal learning environment, connecting different sources of information. This justifies the need for having different learning contents organized in different environments.Vetiver Guidelines: as the handbook, it is also available as flipbook. The guidelines are more focused in how to use the project tools, allowing any teacher to use the resources and courses developed in the project, or to use the resources available in the repository, or even include other resources there.And finally, an important phase of the project has been using all the environment and resources with teachers and students, mainly from VET schools, and getting feedback from them. The project has worked with 35 educational institutions in the 5 countries of the project, so that the numbers of participation in the pilots have been of 112 teachers and 2911 students, and all the feedback we received was quite positive about the resources used and the learning process. So in general during the pilots, teachers further discovered how to include active methodologies in their classes, and how to get access to entrepreneurship training for their students. Meanwhile, the main impact for the students was an experience of an engaging learning environment with quality resources.Of course the project has also created all type of dissemination tools, all of them available from the website and social networks of the project.All the resources and environments developed in the project will remain available for teachers and students under a Creative Commons License (by-nc-sa), giving the opportunity to teachers to be involved in the use of active methodologies like service based learning or flipped classroom, but also think about changing the evaluation process using other tools as ePortfolio, or just reusing the project resources from the website, including them in their own Schools’ Learning Management System

<< Background >>There has long been an awareness that traditional energy resources are limited and that the CO2 emissions from the current use of this energy threaten our climate. However, in addition to being a fundamental pillar in human progress, there is a great demand for energy for sustainable development.Moderation of energy demand is one of the five dimensions of the Union's strategy and the objective is to reduce consumption by at least 32.5% by 2030 (Regulation reviewed on 21/11/2018 on 2012/27/EU).Currently, companies are starting to emphasize energy efficiency, mainly to improve costs and, consequently, competitiveness, but without sufficient knowledge among the members of the organizations. On the other hand, at a particular level, there is always interest due to the cost of energy consumption for some individuals and families.In both cases, apart from this awareness, there is also a lack of knowledge about what we can do and what habits to follow. The BENEFY project consortium is challenged to develop a variety of resources to promote not only awareness, but also to be able to create habits and that energy efficiency is always at the decision making level. In this way, there will be an improvement in energy efficiency in homes and in the personal sphere on the one hand, but also in industry, offices and companies as students gradually enter the labour market.The objective of improving energy efficiency will provide us with the following benefits: - to reduce the European Union's dependence on external energy- to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.- to improve the quality of the air- to improve the competitiveness of companies.<< Objectives >>The objectives of the BENEFY strategic partnership are:- to develop skills in the field of energy efficiency that will help us to achieve the proposed objectives and the indicated benefits. These skills will be aimed at raising awareness at personal, office and industry levels.- to create a toolkit of innovative open educational resources (OER) on energy efficiency- to develop a learning platform that includes learning modules for teachers and their students- to promote innovative methodologies in the teaching of education and vocational training- to implement a repository that includes all the AERs used and all the participants' creations.<< Implementation >>Regarding project implementation actions will be carried out with the following involvement of participants: - 16 professionals from the organizations participating in the project will carry out a training process in the short-term joint training event in Turkey in month 11 of the project, once all the tools and learning modules are developed.- A further 80 VET teachers will receive training in the project areas from the 16 members previously trained at the event. They will then participate in the testing and validation of the systems and make use of the learning modules for use with their students. - The teachers will involve a minimum of 30 students in the project, so that, counting a minimum of 300 students per country, a total of 2100 students will be involved in the project. They will be able to make use of the learning modules to raise awareness of the energy problem. Finally, the project's multiplier actions are important, where each partner will organize a local event between the 22nd and 24th month of the project. The event will last a single day and will bring together between 20 and 40 people involved in VET education.<< Results >>The main results expected from the project are:- A BENEFY Toolkit, collecting the necessary explanatory information, resources, activities and Open Educational Resources (OERs) that serve as useful educational resources for VET.- A web repository with an appropriate taxonomy in relation to energy efficiency, allowing both the insertion of new resources and their consultation.- Breakouts that help to consolidate the knowledge introduced in the classroom on energy and sustainability.- Interactive digital infographics with the necessary information on energy efficiency.- Flipbook of the BENEFY project.- An elearning platform for VET teachers that includes a series of energy efficiency learning modules that allow active participation in the learning process.- Providing badges to certify the acquisition of skills.- An interactive online platform geared towards students in VET centers.- Evaluations of the different steps being taken, as well as a Good Practices guide.- An official BENEFY project website that includes the objectives as well as all important project information. In addition, newsletters and the Facebook page will be published on the website.- Newsletters created by each partner containing information on the progress of the project in the language of each country.