e-learning

An online social network will be put in place for care-workers, experts, researchers and pracitioners with relevance to ICT competences in care-systems, and a set of workshops for care-workers will be organised to pilot the elaborated professional development pathways and tools.

What resonates amongst both groups – care workers and care recipients – is their exposure to the risk of social exclusion as they are both often at the margins of society and likely to be the victim of digital and social divides. ICTs and associated competences have been shown to be a critical component in mitigating these risks of exclusion and helping to support an increased quality of life. The acquisition of digital skills is essential for these actors in the family employment sector where we find over half of all private individual employers aged 60 years old and over, and low-skilled women representing the majority of household employees. In response to these pressing needs the CareNet project will design, develop and pilot learning paths and resources based on cooperative learning between care workers and care recipients to promote improved quality of care and quality of life through the acquisition of care related digital competences. In addition, to answer specific needs, learning modules for individual learning, addressing ICT competences for employability and self-development (care workers) and ICT competences for active ageing (older people) will be created. In this way the project will contribute to: the identified needs for professionalization of care workers; increased access to learning opportunities; personal development of care workers; overcoming the isolation of both care workers and older people by promoting social enterprise, active citizenship and active ageing.

For this reason, the project seeks to design, develop and pilot:

•  
• learning paths and resources based on cooperative learning between care workers and care recipients
• to promote improved quality of care and quality of life through the acquisition of care related digital competences.
• In addition, to answer specific needs, learning modules for individual learning, addressing employability and self-development of ICT competences for care workers and active ageing ICT competences for elders, will be provided and piloted.

The project will contribute to:

• professionalization;
• increased access to learning opportunities;
• personal development of care workers;
• overcoming the isolation of care workers and elders by promoting active citizenship and active ageing.

Details of on the project can be found at the project website: http://www.carenetproject.eu/

Following the recommendations of the Rocard report on science education in Europe, the use of problem-based and inquiry-based approaches is important because they provide the means to increase students' interest and motivation.

LD-Skills is a pilot project that is funded by the European Comission's Comenius Multilateral project programme. It has started in January 2011 and is expected to run for 2 years.

If you and a group of other people want to use digital media and networks to co-learn together, this handbook is a practical tool for learning how to self-organize peer learning, the so-called “peeragogy.” Material about conceptualizing and convening co-learning — the stuff about getting started — is located toward the top of the table of contents. Material about assessment, resources, use cases is located toward the bottom of the TOC. But you don’t have to read it in sequential order. Hop around if you’d like.

Understanding how co-learning works will help you do co-learning more effectively. So there's material about learning theories that support peer learning or that reveal useful characteristics of successful peer learning. For those who want to delve more deeply into the empirical research and scholarship, we’ve linked to a sister document — a literature review of learning theory related to peeragogy. For those who want to study more deeply about the aspects of peer learning summarized in articles, the handbook provides a list of links to related handbook articles, and a set of resources for further study.