30 May Telecentre Europe to present I-LINC platform at Lifelong Learning conference
30 May, 2015
Telecentre Europe has been invited to present its current projects at the upcoming annual conference of the European Civil Society Platform on lifelong Learning (EUCIS–LLL) in Luxembourg on June 16th. EUCIS-LLL is a well-known network of organisations active in the area of lifelong learning. As a candidate member of the network, Telecentre Europe will contribute to the conference workshops with ideas and examples from our running projects. After all, digital skills and telecentres provide many excellent examples of Lifelong Learning in action!
Lifelong Learning is a priority of the Education and Training 2020 strategy (“ET2020”) and many European Member States have adopted national and regional lifelong learning strategies. However, there is more room for the EU to play an active role in promoting lifelong learning as a general model or paradigm, something that is already being done by International organisations such as UNESCO and the OECD.
This year the focus of the conference will be on “opening routes to learning and qualifications”. One of the topics discussed at the conference will be validation or recognition of non-formal and informal learning, a significant issue for telecentres and the people who use them. Other conference topics to mention are: “bridging the gap between education and the labour market”, “transversal skills”, and “digital pedagogy”.
Telecentre Europe agrees that implementing lifelong learning strategies requires working in partnership across a number of sectors. For this reason we will be eager to present our new stakeholder platform I-LINC, funded under the HORIZON2020 programme of the European Commission. The I-LINC platform, to be launched in the summer 2015, will be an online environment for professionals to network and come up with ideas to boost employability and entrepreneurship capacities of young people, especially those at risk of social exclusion. It will be the only stakeholder platform exclusively dedicated to the topic of ICT (for) learning and inclusion.
Our participation is foreseen within the workshop titled “Tackling the low-skilled gap”, where we will also present the project Fit4jobs – a pilot initiative currently under way in six EU countries. The project, financed from the EU PROGRESS * programme, involves our members as NGOs and telecentre networks active in the field of digital inclusion/skills. It places them as intermediaries between the unemployed, training providers and employers. The main premise of the Fit4jobs project and training model is that employers play a crucial role in determining the skills and content of the trainings, and this extends to issues such as soft skills and mentoring.
*European Union Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity – PROGRESS (2007-2013).
By Masha Tarle