The DISC project: the kick-off meeting, the partnership and the next steps
How to improve digital skills of immigrants and young people from disadvantaged groups?
How to facilitate their integration and promote active citizenship?
The DISC project is working to give an answer to these questions!
Digital skills are increasingly important in the labour market Europe-wide and are also essential for social and civic participation. Providing people with migratory background with such skills will not only boost their employability, but also foster their ability to communicate, bond with the local communities and participate as active citizens.
The rationale behind the project is based on upscaling of two best practices which are already well-established within some of the partner organizations. Firstly, the LAUREA’s multisensory space method is a highly effective open learning environment and tool as well as source of inspiration. Secondly, the SMART PLUS by INCOMA is an online tool for self-assessment of digital skills.
These two best practices will be adapted to the local context of the partner countries and pilot-tested with groups of 40 participants per country. Moreover, a training tool for teachers and educators will be developed in order to give them the necessary competences to teach digital skills.
From the 11th to the 13th of February 2019, the five partner organisations of the DISC consortium met in Vantaa, Finland for their first meeting, where they shared their experience, discussed the best practices and launched the project activities. The outcome of the first meeting was an agreement on the next steps of the project implementation and dissemination.
In the upcoming months the partners will carry out a need analysis to get a sense of what is actually needed in the local context, to which best practices will have to be adapted to. This research phase will involve both migrants and local learners and teachers who will provide valuable data on the most needed skills and what are the barriers teachers and learners face.
Strong and well-balanced partnership of the DISC project is formed of three universities from Finland, Belgium and Slovenia and two organisations from Italy and Spain:
LAUREA University of Applied Sciences (Finland, Co-ordinator)
www.laurea.fi
CESIE (Italy)
www.cesie.org
INCOMA (Spain)
www.incoma.net
UC Leuven-Limburg (Belgium)
www.ucll.be
Univerza v Mariboru (Slovenia)
www.um.si