Using our expertise for a better recovery
The United Kingdom may have left the ERASMUS+ Scheme, but our contributions are just getting started! As the pandemic comes to an end and we all enter a period of recovery, we’re proud to be able to say that we're leading nine new ERASMUS+ projects to help empower businesses, people, and learners.
A true recovery will require creativity, new thinking and innovative ideas, the sort of approach that we hope to offer through the projects we lead. It’s more important than ever that we deliver tools that people can use to improve their skills. Working with partners from all across Europe, over the next two years, we’ll be lending our digital and project management expertise to these valuable tasks.
Supporting SMEs
Some of these new projects are about supporting and empowering small and medium sized businesses, just like us. Snailville, for example, aims to support and improve the success of snail farms, in addition to helping people who're considering starting a snail farming business, but who might lack a particular area of expertise.
The project aims to achieve this by creating an interactive game where users can gain knowledge and skills to help them sustain their heliculture businesses. The materials will be developed by the consortium of transnational partners and integrated into our heliculture game.
Other projects include PEACOC, directed at construction SMEs, and BCT4SMEs, directed at SMEs more broadly. These projects aim to improve the uptake and use of technology in their respective spheres, and e-business in particular. If there’s one thing that businesses have been forced to reckon with in the last year, it’s that e-business is more important than ever before, with online orders, digital payments, and remote working all increasingly popular.
These projects will support businesses in implementing these ideas through a personalised online tool, that'll create a strategy specific to each user so that they’re only getting the advice most relevant to their situation.
Empowering individuals
As mentioned, projects focused on empowering individuals are also part of our new portfolio. The PBRAND4ALL and SeeFirst projects are particularly relevant here: they aim to support those who are looking for jobs in building their personal brand and in improving their soft skills respectively. Given the situation that Europe’s economy is now in after over a year of pandemic and lockdowns, this is a very important set of skills to be promoting in the coming months and years.
PBRAND4ALL will deliver this support material, again specially designed and written for the project, through a personalised tool similar to those mentioned above. This will again allow users to follow a tailored set of practical actions that will help them manage and improve their personal brand based on their specific situations.
Innovative Education
The last type of projects we’re working on, after what must be one of the most unusual years of education in living memory, are those seeking to empower both teachers and students, equipping them with more engaging tools, new skills, and innovative ideas.
Rural Global Citizenship Education (Rural GCE) and IPINSTEAM are two examples of these, seeking to build a set of tools and resources with which teachers can better engage students in global citizenship (specifically rural students) and intellectual property issues respectively. Given the past year, issues like this – rural education and intellectual property in STEM subjects – seem particularly relevant, as remote working and learning becomes more feasible and the technology that enables it becomes concurrently more important.
Finally, in Spaceguardians 2 and STEM4CLIM8, we’re hoping to build on previous successful projects to create new tools entirely. Spaceguardians 2 is a follow-on to the previous project Spaceguardians, which created an interactive and engaging e-book to get young children engaged in astronomy – a feat that we hope to recreate and improve upon with our new e-book.
Similarly, STEM4CLIM8 uses a methodology not unlike RetroSTEM and PLAY2LEARN in its use of a specialised games console to engage young people in learning about a given issue – in this case climate change.
Our future with Erasmus+ projects
Overall, we hope that our new projects are able to make a tangible and positive difference in our society, supporting business, people, and education in substantive and innovative ways. And whatever else may happen, we look forward to the strong and productive partnerships that allow us to make this happen.
