"<< Background >>The growing wave of intolerance in Europe is a phenomenon that begins to materialize in everyday situations of intolerance that have a negative impact on the people affected, their environment, and society.In fact, the latest report (2019) by Human Rights Watch leads the idea that there is currently an ideological trend in the European Union that favours intolerance, and causes serious difficulties for the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups, such as immigrants, people with a different religion, women, children, or disabled people.The European Union Fundamental Rights Agency also published a conclusion that assured that ""harassment and inequality increase while the protection of fundamental rights declines"" (FRA, 06/06/2019).However, many of the people affected by intolerance situations, being mostly low-skilled or low-qualified, and / or belonging to minorities or disadvantaged groups, do not have the skills or knowledge necessary to manage these situations, and the scenario in which are framed; thus minimizing the negative impact that intolerance situations have on their lives, or their influence on those of others.The SAFE Project team believes that one of the most useful, necessary and productive ways of dealing with this situation, and improving the future expectations and the horizon of people affected -or potentially affected- by intolerance, is to encourage their social inclusion potential giving to these people, as -secondarily- to the professionals who work with them, skills and procedures that help them to manage situations of intolerance.Acquiring skills for the management and minimization of these situations is something that not only positively drives the affected people, but also has a very positive resonant effect on their environment, and on the social structure of their environment. Providing these people with a path to improve their skills in this field will be addressed with the following identified needs:- Need 1: Intolerance has increased dramatically in the European Union being a serious problem that must be addressed from its most important operational ramifications.- Need 2: The proliferation of situations linked to intolerance in day-by-day, as well as its importance and consequences, condition the lives of affected and has multiplied the social exclusion issues that they usually face. - Need 3: Fake news has become a strong instrument in the promotion of intolerance and against social inclusion. It's urgent that people affected, directly or around them, learn to manage fake news in a positive inclusion context.- Need 4: The creation of exclusion and intolerance situations is generating a high cost both socially and economically that it's necessary to decrease.Through these objectives, SAFE will create the necessary tools -also promoting its use- to acquire high-quality skills updated to the intolerance problem that has emerged last two years in Europe, and mainly to provide low-skilled/qualified adults valid procedures to manage these intolerance situations in any context, positive values, appropriate notions of social coexistence, and procedures to detect fake news, under a paradigm of equality, integration, solidarity, and respect for differences.The SAFE Target groups are primary low skilled/qualified adults as migrants, racial/social/religious minorities, refugees, women, disabled people, seniors, or long-term unemployed people; as well other adults’ segment currently affected by intolerance. Secondarily, social workers, trainers and staff that supports and work with this groups.<< Objectives >>By implementing this Project, the detected needs will be addressed, as well as the underlying reality in the context of potential intolerance described.With the SAFE Project implementing, will be achieved:- Make a valuable contribution to the reduction of intolerance in Europe, reducing both the emergence of situations of social exclusion and its impact.- Improve the ability of adults to manage situations of intolerance and/or social exclusion through the positive values of the EU.- Reduce the influence and negative consequences of fake news on social inclusion situations, as its potential capacity to generate conflicts around involved groups.- Reduce the social and economic costs that intolerance and its consequences cause today in European society.The most important result that SAFE Project materialization will provide is a contribution in value to the reduction of intolerance and social exclusion in the European Union, through providing adults with high quality skills, procedures and tools to manage intolerance or social exclusion using positive values, distinguishing fake news as such, disabling its practical influence, and promoting a perspective of inclusion based on respect, equality, and justice in European society.Additionally, other equally important achievements will be reached, and whose projection and resonance will contribute to changing the context in which this intolerance arises at the local level, in the environment of these four partners, as well as in the national or international scope that their usual activities and this project reach:- Dissemination of the need of contribute day by day to forming a respectful Europe where intolerance and social exclusion doesn't find a place.- Increase the job and social horizon of adults, and their potential capacity for integration at this levels.- Reduction of the incidence and consequences of situations of social exclusion and intolerance among the most disadvantaged groups.- Better conditions for the social inclusion of minorities or other disadvantaged groups in the target territory.- Creation of a long-term cooperation/exchange network for intolerance/exclusion affected people, around the application of the SAFE contents and methodologies in day-by-day situations, after project have finished.- Reduction of the social and economic costs derived from the proliferation of situations of social exclusion.<< Implementation >>To achieve these milestones SAFE Project will develop the following activities:- Development of a Framework in the management of current exclusion situations and European awareness, defining a context of action for the promotion of social inclusion linked to the European social reality of the last two years.- Development of a common European curriculum in tools, procedures and concept linked to effectively manage the daily situations of social exclusion that are currently proliferating in Europe.- Development of a European Methodology for promoting essential values of tolerance in relation to the current intolerant situation, updated to this last intolerance trends, and current social barriers.- Creation of an accessible web training platform where target groups will have high quality learning resources to improve their skills, knowledge and procedures, to manage situations of intolerance and / or social exclusion in the current context of Europe.- A SAFE Project online community where additional experiences and resources would be shared around the training of adults to face situations of social exclusion, exchange of opinions and strategies, collaboration between people or entities, or collective promotion of positive values for the tolerance. In addition, this Project involves carrying out the following activities necessary to achieve these developments and comply with the proposed objectives and commitments:- Five Transnational Project Meetings to organize, examine and work around the creation of the above tools.- A five days Learning, Teaching, Training Activity days in Potenza, Italy, with the participation of two members of the staff of each partner, and two people of the target of this project; participating in both learning activities in this field, as well as reflection on this trend of intolerance, and the potential of developing tools.- Four “Congress of Skills & Tools for an effective social inclusion” to be held in Norway, Italy, Ireland and Spain.- An intense dissemination effort, including the creation of a website, leaflets, briefings, newsletters, social networking, local meetings, and creation of material linked to SAFE to distribute among associated partners, stakeholders, and other organizations interested in its products.All these activities will be carried out following a specific work plan, whose continuous monitoring of its control parameters, will ensure its effective materialization according to the planned objectives.<< Results >>The most important result that SAFE Project materialization will provide is a contribution in value to the reduction of intolerance and social exclusion in the European Union, through providing adults with high quality skills, procedures and tools to manage intolerance or social exclusion using positive values, distinguishing fake news as such, disabling its practical influence, and promoting a perspective of inclusion based on respect, equality, and justice in European society.Other outcomes expected by this partnership are four training courses, as well the framework, curriculum, and methodology, as freely resources to be able to be used totally or partially in future training plans in this field; offering to target, associations, public institutions, and organizations or agents that promote equality and social cohesion, valuable tools to learn to manage situations of exclusion in an appropriate way, while promoting values of tolerance and respect.Additionally, SAFE project will provide a virtual community in which will participate disadvantaged groups potentially affected by situations of social exclusion or intolerance, professionals who give support to this group, social workers and associations, and professionals in education or training. The usual activity of this community will promote the exchange of experiences, exchange of values, doubts solving, sharing resources to improve the competences of the target people, sharing cooperation initiatives between professionals and organizations, or promoting cooperation between single participants and entities in the field of social inclusion and tolerance awareness. SAFE sustainability will be achieved with the proliferation and application, updating and reuse of the product results created, as well through the activity promoted from this virtual community; and in future initiatives of the long-term cooperation/exchange network for intolerance/exclusion affected people; as well as in the consequences of dissemination work around education and training decision makers, including members of the educational communities who will collaborate in the outputs development and dissemination.Far from being an isolated initiative, the members of the SAFE Project partnership believe that it must be a step in a long way that is necessary and urgent to face of."

BlendedVET, aims at creating an online, flexible training for VET trainers who are willing to combine face to face and online instruction modalities. Blended learning has become a widespread teaching modality, especially in K-12 and higher education. Briefly, blended learning is the fusion of online and face‐to‐face contact between teachers and students. Blended learning environments include not only the physical presence of teachers and students but also the students’ ownership and control of time, place, setting, path, and pace at which their learning takes place (Banditvilai, 2016). The project will be an answer towards helping VET teachers to transform existing trainings into blended learning or create blended learning trainings. More specifically, we aim to provide VET trainers with examples of existing blended learnings to inspire them, to give them methodology and guidance for developing their own blended learning based on their trainings they deliver. For this purpose, we will create a learning package in blended learning (so trainers can directly experience the methodology while creating their own content) and a training model which will allow to implement the teacher training in all VET centres and on any topics. Our outcomes will not be topic related but blended learning methodology related.That is what we want to achieve during our BlendedVET project.The project objective is in line with ‘Europe 2020’ Strategy promoting synergies of experience and know-how among 5 EU countries and different types of institutions involved in education and training. Our proposal will support in particular better training and information for trainers with the aim to facilitate the use of innovative digital approaches in VET training. Our outcomes will have impact at local, regional, national, European or international level with competences in digital training field and innovative curriculum creation.The project action will be carried out at European level in 5 countries in different national contexts, characterised by different educational policies and needs.The project is led by AFORMAC, with 4 partner organisations: AFORMAC, Euroform, Fønix, Eu-Trade. We are all Vet training centres or representing those. Researches for examples will be conducted in all EU countries and results published in English and each partner countries language.We will proceed by 4 steps:A1: Collection and research of blended learning best practices and methods:The research and definition of learning methods and methodologies combined with the best practices research will lead to a guide about blended learning to provide teachers who are willing to use blended learning in their practice some theoretical and practical guidance.A2: Learning package for blended learning curricular creation:This output will lead to the creation of a learning package for blended learning curricular creation. To create this model the partnership will establish the learning objectives, curricular activities (in a blended learning form), gather and/or create teaching materials to conduct the activities and determine assessment methods.A3: Blended learning training program model:The partnership will elaborate and test a Blended learning Training program model. Obviously, convinced by the idea that we learn better by experience, we will design the training model in the form of a blended learning training. 90% of the course will be online and 10% face to face. The developed model course will have a duration of 3 months in total and represent 100 hours. A4: Learning Platform:It will lead to the creation of an online platform which will include the examples from output 1 and the blended learning package from output 2, the blended learning training program model and the experiences form the pilot training output 3The results will be:Based on the needs around blended learning, the project will produce an online learning package and a corresponding training model to assist VET training centres in applying blended learning practices. The learning package will be a user-friendly, practical instrument to support professional development of trainer’s leadership teams. It will consist of the following components:•Theoretical and practical guidance for blended learning creation •Blended Learning package •Model for implementation of the content and pilot training •2 Tutors in each partner country•Learning platform with moocs and infographics for training The output files will be accessible to all and free.

"The aim of this project is to develop a complete training program for entrepreneurship training for the unemployed. The target group for our project is teachers and trainers already working with jobseekers. We want to investigate how entrepreneurship training can help unemployed participants in a best possible way to develop new business ideas and providing them with the skills and confidence to convert them into action.Entrepreneurship training as a path towards sustainable labor market integration has become a growing policy priority for the European Commission the last years.For instance, Principle 1 of the European Pillar of Social Rights emphasizes the importance of training and lifelong learning for the acquisition of skills necessary for labor market participation and social inclusion. This policy priority is also linked to Principle 5 of the Pillar on guaranteeing secure and adaptable employment while encouraging innovative forms of work. All over Europe a great deal of attention is paid to the work of the advisers in three groups of employees in the labour market: young people aged 18 to 25 years old, employees in the 55 plus age group and employees who have to deal with limitations in their taxability. These vulnerable groups are a ""challenge"" to mediate. Especially if the group is unemployed and has ideas for establishing itself on the labour market as a self-employed person. Our aim is that the results of this project will have large impact on the personal and substantive development of organization – both public and private – who works with guidance of unemployed, coaches/trainers and other stakeholders. In short, the potential impact of this project will be great for the various stakeholders, participants / jobseekers, and partners / clients. For example, changes will be visible in various areas, such as: - improved conversation skills of the advisers - more confidence among participants to enter the labour market as a self-employed person - improved and increased supply of training curriculum - improved conceptual framework and being able to apply it in practice.By promoting entrepreneurship training, we can help to open and disseminate the knowledge held by different stakeholders regarding jobseekers who wants to start and succeed in their own business."

This Erasmus+ - MOOCs IN BASIC SKILLS TRAINING - is based on the valuable experiences gained through a previous Erasmus + project - BASIC SKILLS IN WORKING LIFE (2016-1-NO01-KA204-022071). The new project is a continuation of this project with the same partnership.The partnership consist of FONIX from Norway (leade partner), BEST from Austria, STEP from Slovenia, CITEVE from Portugal and CONFAPI from Italy.One of the main outcomes the Erasmsu+ project BASIC SKILLS IN WORKING LIFE consisted of a large number of quantitative and qualitative data collected from eight different branches in six countries. All results and reports are thoroughly documented on the project's website: http://www.basicskillsinworkinglife.no/From the data collected, we observed that across all countries and branches the need of soft skills was more valued than the need of technical skills. By soft skills, we defined the “character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person's relationships with other people, they are to do with who people are, rather than what they know. Therefore, they encompass the character traits that decide how well one interacts with others. In workplace they are considered a complement to hard skills”. In this new project MOOCs IN BASIC SKILLS TRAINING we plan to take these findings to a higher level and take into account for further discussion and development the following issues: 1. Soft skills are more needed than occupational skills in the “new” industry. The question is how these will enhance low skilled employees, and how we can prepare a curriculum for better training for the target group. 2. If common training framework for low skilled employees is to be put in place; how to accommodate all partners’ needs?To answer these questions we will conduct a project that produce curriculums for practical training courses on the most important social skills in working life, supporting digital learning maps and combined and incorporated with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The target groups in the project MOOCs IN BASIC SKILLS TRAINING are low skilled workers with a demand for new skills and / or formal coalification in terms of soft skills in working life. In this project, we are specially aiming for employees in companies / branches where the demand for the new skills are generated as a result of technological changes and / or new digitalized production methods. The project MOOCs IN BASIC SKILLS TRAINING will work in three phases that each are covered and defined by an Intellectual Output:IO1 First we will create concrete curriculums for training courses based on the results from our previous Erasmus+ project. We have a lot of materials since we already explored and developed this with practical training and pilots in each partner country, as well as a Teacher-Training-Event in Portugal in 2017.IO2 Secondly, based on the curriculums we will produce digital learning maps in accordance with each curriculum for employees with low basic skills. The learning maps will both function as individual “skill checkers” and important motivation tools as well as concrete learning material for online courses.IO3 At last – and as the major output from this project - we will produce three different Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to support the online training. The main outcome of this project is practical focusing on producing minimum three MOOCs that can be presented and distributed on many different platforms throughout the partner countries. Each MOOCs will be minimum 30 minutes long and will be produced in English with subtitles in each countries language. The MOOCs can also be linked to “classrooms” inside the companies as well to other national and international digital learning platforms that are used by providers all over Europe.This offers a multi-perspective and practical view on how and why providers should implement basic skills training in communication and soft skills as an important strategy for training for employees in a modern working life.

“Early school leaving” and student retention is a challenge amongst educational institutions across Europe. Students who have dropped out of school struggle with lower employment rates and lower participation in adult education for the rest of their lives. This means, that there is lasting and possible devastating effect on the individual pathways in life of early school leaving. Traditionally the approach to student retention has been reactive; when the student has been missing classes for some period of time, the school initiates a plan for “bringing the student back”. What this project consortium proposes is to change this approach from reactive to proactive: Developing a structured way of using data proactively could make it possible to help a given student – maybe even before he or she realizes that they need help. By creating methods described in a Guidebook and developing the Onboarding & Student Retention-app (O&SR-app) that both “onboards” the students to the given educational environment and creates a possible predicative retention approach to guidance counseling by having the students themselves easily indicate how they experience going to school, we could help a lot more students before they drop out, instead of trying to bring them back. The objective of the project is therefore to use data proactively to combat the considerable challenge of early school leaving. The O&SR-project will be carried out by six consortium partners: Fønix (Norway), a provider of HR services and career guidance counseling for adults; North East Scotland College (Scotland), a college which works with digital tools and education; TAKK (Finland), an adult educational institution; Manzavision (France), a digital product developer; Center for Ungdomsforskning (CeFU) (Denmark), a research center located at Aalborg University that specializes in youth, youth culture and youth well-being and VUC Storstrøm (Denmark), an adult educational institution. The Guidebook and the O&SR-app will be developed by testing on approximately 400 students, 24 guidance counselors, 40 teachers and 4 managers at four different European schools. It is expected that as a result of the project innovations the student drop-out rate will be reduced by 10% to 20% in the early school leaving risk group. This could potentially have a widespread regional, national and European impact at educational institution level, but it could also contribute vastly to individual student schooling experience and thereby foster social inclusion.