“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.

The main objective of the project is to create a qualification and communication platform to simplify to use of game elements in the classroom of VET. The results of the project will therefore consist of an initial content collection of best practice cases provided on the platform. In order to be able to use these in a simple way and to expand them continuously, the platform will be designed in such a way that it is very easy to use and requires very little training. From the point of view of the project consortium, ease of use represents a central barrier for teachers, as they have relatively little time for preparation. By establishingan online-community towards Game Based Learning in VET schools, it should be ensured that the platform can continue to be maintained independently by the teachers even after the end of the project and that the teachers already involved can easily integrate new interested users.

The Hotel Academy Project aims at conceiving and testing an integrated set of tools and pedagogical modalities based on the most advanced immersive interactive tools and pedagogical practice for the benefit of Vocational Education and Training for the Hospitality industry.This Project is initiated and led by Manzavsion, specialist in the creation and production of digital tools and user experiences, for training, communication, marketing. Manzavision is working for/with corporations, schools, colleges, universities. The impulse to conceive such Project comes from the involvement of Manzalab in studying the needs for improvement of training modalities in the Hospitality industry, coupled with the realisation that digital collaborative tools will only be adopted nationally and internationally, if practical use cases are conceived and purposely experienced by the educators, Trainees and Interns/Apprentices concerned. In that respect, studies and professionals of the sector all concur to stress the outmost importance to develop Vocational Training and the use of associated collaborative digital tools. Manzavsion reached towards 3 prominent specialised European organisations to build a Strategic Partnership to that effect:> ESGCV-ECGCI (ESG), the most recognised Hospitality training school in Paris (MBA ESG programme) aims at developing the Trainees’ ability to understand how the Hospitality business is rapidly mutating. This requires developing skills dealing with understanding the international evolution of the business, as well as being at the forefront of evolutions of technological tools and practice of digital media.> European University Cyprus (EUC) also a prominent European University with a specific Hospitality training program, slightly remote from the centre of Europe.> Fachhoschule Dresden (FHD), is holding a specialized program dedicated to Tourism and Event management in Germany, sharing also the same vision about the international aspects of the Hospitality business.The particularity of the 3 “training Partners” is that is that they all have long established relationships with the Hotel Industry and that all Trainees follow intensive internship and/or apprenticeship sessions in the framework of their Vocational Training activity. Practice of, and anchor into, working conditions is indeed key to the efficacy of training in this industry and paramount to this Project. The first step of the Project is to design a didactic framework for the development and use of multimodal learning scenarios in the field of Hospitality management, then to analyse the specific pedagogical objectives to be reached and to develop specific content dedicated to the envisioned experimentations.These experimentations will be made using three types of digital interactive tools:- TEEMEW VR Academy, a distant collaborative classroom in virtual reality (VR);- SMART, a play-based personal social micro learning system on mobile phones;- immersive Serious Games (Hospitality, Negotiation) inside as well as outside of the VR classroom;These digital tools will be specifically adapted first to be in tune with the Hospitality subject matter in terms of design and activity themes. Then several functions will specifically be enacted to allow key pedagogical interaction, e.g. introducing a lecturer, organizing quizzes and tests, playing HTML serious games inside the VR environment, create groups of Trainees etc. Educators will create an array of content to be uploaded into the tools above. They will also combine them with other non-embedded materials and methods extending the exercise of the studied multimodal approach.The Partners envision to hold a sizeable number of experimental calibrated sessions of a few hours each over 1,5 year. Distant Key Contributing Personalities, will remotely deliver VR lecture and interaction sessions with Trainees. Trainees and Interns/Apprentices will practice with Serious Games and Smart on an ongoing basis, with results shared inside and outside of Teemew VR Academy.The consolidated analysis produced as a result of the experimentations will be shared with experts of an Advisory Board as a basis to discuss the final version of the didactic and pedagogical framework. All reports produced, methodology, results, pedagogic content etc. will be freely disseminated, continuously over the course of the project through various media and publications as well as during 2 specific events in February 21 in Cyprus and August 22 in France.For the Dissemination of the framework within the European Union, a communication concept will be developed. It will characterize the country specifics of the VET field and lists the local VET institutions as well as country specific communication channels and events of the area of tourism and hospitality industry.The project expects to impact all VET organisations dedicated to the Hospitality and beyond the entire VET and educative community by extension.