Skillability is a in initiative which is based on project partners' expertise, shared values, commitment to equal opportunities and to design and development of innovative education-based solutions. We are well aware of the specific challenges that many people with disabilities need to overcome in their lives. Many such challenges are in the focus of national and regional policy measures, and within the EU there are a number of common frameworks on coordinated policies and strategies. With Skillability, we are addressing a niche group withing the wider group of people with disabilities: people with talents or skills which can, if supported, become for them an additional source of financial income, contribute to the development of entrepreneurial attitudes, open the road to greater financial independence, reduce the reliance on the social systems, facilitate the return to formal or non-forma education and training systems, provide direct opportunities for digital training in developing new skills and partial qualifications, extend their contact and social networks, help reduce the impact of inaccessible physical enviroment and geography-based challenges.We intend to create a digital platform where people with disabilities can present their talents, skills or products for the visitors of the platform - individuals and businesses - to purchase or to support in other ways. The platform will be people-centric with its main property being a solid centerpiece of a wider and more comprehensive support infrastructure. This infrastructure will consist of specially-deisgned digital training courses focusing on: Personal presentation skills, Digital sales, Product presentation (incl. copywriting, graphics and video), Terms of service in the digital world, Remote services, Logistics and delivery (National/International), Pricing and promotion, and a range of additional topics and subjects which will come up from the direct work of our organisations with the target group of the project. The platform will be focused on bringing the two parties in a typical marketplace together, but in a spirit of support and common purpose. No payments will be made through the platform - all purchases and other support will pass through other standard secure channels for this, and Skillability is not designed to be a commercial platform.We will develop a comprehensive methodology for individual needs' assessment and for designing individualised training paths for each Skillability platform member. A team of trained mentors in each country will then work with interested people and help them on the platform. We expect that this work will also include the various stakeholders in this very specific field - these could be parents or other family members, the immediate support network of the candidate, their case social worker, their doctors, physical or occupational therapists. We will then, based on a thorough assessment and the personal plans and aspirations of each participant, carry a complete training needs analysis and develop an individual training path for them. The training will be a product of the collaboration between key licensed education and training institutions and organisations who have joined the project, and who stand by to develop further digital training courses and resources for Skillability based on the aggregated results from all training needs analyses.To further support the Skillability initiative participants, we will carefully construct and anthology of stories, successes and failures, personal stories and achievements. This will be used to shed light on the potential, on the capabilities, and away from the disability. We expect that such a collection can have an imprtant inspirational and motivational effect for many others - in particular in countries and societies where a disability is still largely a drive for stigmatisation, or where there are still significat obstacles - physical and otherwise - to successful and seamless integration of all people with disabilities in the economical, social, cultural and educational systems.

"Co-creation has become a hot topic in education, especially because of its promising potential to leverage the input of students, fellow educators and experts in the professional field to provide up-to-date course material in a rapidly changing environment. This is especially the case in higher and adult education which is characterised by an increasingly diverse body of students, including learners with additional degrees and prior work experience. Involving students in the co-creation of course material not only actively engages them with the subject material, it also provides a learning opportunity for 21st century skills such as digital fluency, multidisciplinary collaboration and self-management. Furthermore, co-creation also encompasses the input from fellow educators from related disciplines and stakeholders in the professional field, augmenting the diversity of perspectives offered through education. However, co-creating courses content often proves to be a highly time consuming process for the educator, with a lot of time being spent on course management and hence reducing their focus on content. The time bottleneck is peculiarly present in higher and adult education where educators have a wide variety of roles and large numbers of students. The aim of this project was to test the co-creation approach in a wide variety of educational settings. We therefore choose a varied set of partners, including universities, university colleges and adult education partners. Through these pilot courses we learned from each other and the partners disseminated experiences in their local networks. The project consisted of a preparation, test, evaluation and dissemination phase. Partners were prepared for the pilot courses in a co-creation training via a MOOC and a hands-on training session using design thinking tools. The co-creation approach was subsequently evaluated during a series of pilot courses in various educational settings. Finally, all developed training material and resources were made openly accessible via a CC-license on the projects' website: https://www.cocos.education > outcomes > intellectual outcomes. To facilitate co-creation, the CoCOS project applied the mindset, methods and tools gleaned from open source development to the co-creation of course content. Within the project we shared our experiences with and further pilot open source platforms explicitly designed to reduce course management during course co-creation. Using version control technology - typically used in software development - these platforms automatically keep track of what content was created by whom at what point in time. In addition, they provide a hierarchical control structure, allowing the educator to keep (or delegate) editorial control over the final course. Since no such platform exist(ed) the consortium build a proof of concept of such platform based on the projects' findings. This open source web based platform ""CoCOS Suite"" is available via https://www.cocos.education > get started > CoCOS Suite. Since the different stakeholders involved really believe in such a platform the project lead Artevelde University of Applied Sciences decided to continue to invest in the development of the platform in order to being able to release a stable 1.0 version to the public. The project mainly kicked-off with a training event in Ghent, Belgium once the basis resources (conceptual framework and online training) for this training were developed, in which educators were trained via design thinking tools, followed by the pilots in the different partner institutions. Throughout the pilot trajectory 512 students were reached across all partner institutions via 21 different pilot courses. The experiences of students, educators and experts were monitored and analysed via surveys. This resulted in a Learning Guide where do's and don'ts based on the pilots' analysis, with regards to co-creation were bundled. All project outcomes are available in English, Dutch, Spanish, Bulgarian and Slovenian via the projects' website. At the end of the project each partner organised a local multiplier event, which was meant to be organised during a F2F format. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the format was changed into a virtual format with a set of video's, a webinar and with hands-on sessions in those partner countries where the restrictions allowed to do so. In total 112 people participated during the online or face-to-face organised multiplier events. The project resulted in 6 very important outcomes:- IO1 : Conceptual Framework- IO2 : On-line training platform and co-creation tool- IO3 : Method and Resources for F2F Co-Creation Training: Guidebook- IO4 : Pilot approaches and analysed results- IO5 : Learning Guide for Educators- IO6 : Website, with MOOC, testimonials, presentations, user-stories and published outcomes"

Short summarywww.teachstem.eu is an initiative developed under the ARTIFEX project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the EU. Its aim is to provide support and resources for STEM teachers to improve their practices and methodologies, further the specific STEM partnerships at schools and communities, and provide insights to policy makers with regard to the existing models and the challenges we all face in re-shaping our education and training systems and strengthening them with STEM-competences.Description.STEM is a very large field of work and exploration. With the ARTIFEX project and through the learning platform (see link above), the project attempts to help educators identify their personal strengths and weaknesses with regard to teaching STEM, and to assist them in improving their skills and competences by providing ready-to-use practical workshops. The learning platform offers the following components.Self-assessment tool for teachers and educatorsOur ARTIFEX SAT was built and tested by university researchers of Antwerp University and Karlstad University and it helps teachers and practitioners who wish to integrate STEM in their classes and workshops better understand their strengths and weaknesses with regard to teaching STEM in relation to the 21st Century Skills. Based on a short questionnaire, the tool will recommend personalized workshop scripts and instructions tailored to the specific competences and activity areas which an educator chooses to improve. This tool is available in different languages.WorkshopsDevelopers in Belgium (Stedelijk Onderwijs Antwerpen and Artevelde Hogeschool), Italy (H-Farm), Sweden (Karlstad University, teacher learning department), Greece (Ellinogermanika Agogi) have designed and tested a collection of STEM workshops. Each workshop comes with a set of instructions - difficulty level, group size, materials, activities, timing. All workshops were peer reviewed and tested on their impact by several dozen European schools. Their comments and additions have been included in the workshops as inspiring practices for their colleague teachers. STEM is a fun way for students to learn an important set of skills and be better prepared for their future workplace. With the help of the Assessment Tool and workshops, teachers can improve their competences. Best practices, some ideas for policy makersSuccessful STEM education typically requires cooperation between schools, teachers, students, local authorities and communities, and the business. The University of Antwerp has collected on www.teachstem.eu interesting cooperation models from different EU countries to help policy makers understand the variety of possibilities when designing STEM policies on a local or a regional level. InsightsRead what people who currently hold STEM-related occupations say about their work, their vision for the future of their jobs and sectors, and the challenges ahead for education. Or go to www.teachstem.eu to read about the ARTIFEX research. In a collaboration between the University of Antwerp and the University of Karlstad, Belgian and Swedish teachers were asked about their feelings of competence, and their concerns regarding working in a high-tech informal learning environment.ReachAll elements of the tool and project are freely available on the learning platform www.teachstem.eu

Literacy and numeracy are fundamental skills for the human development as it enables people to live meaningful lives and contribute to their communities and in society. Research shows that low literacy and low numeracy are often connected. These skills are all essential for learning, as learning is mediated through texts and the use of numbers. In Europe, one in five 16-65 year-olds have poor reading skills. In Europe it is estimated that around 55 million adults between 16 and 65 years old have to deal with these difficulties. Research shows that Europeans between ages 26-35 ranked highest in low literacy, followed by those aged from 16-25, than by those aged 36-45 concluded by 46 years and older. This group can be seen as a group that also has the most interest and advantage by gaining digital, literacy and numeracy skills especially. People coping with these difficulties often also lack proficiency in digital skills. They already have problems with reading simple texts, retrieve simple facts, or make straightforward judgements and they are not able to deal with longer or more complex texts. The EU representatives in this project partnership will therefore create a modern and innovative platform - The RED platform (“Reinforce Europeans Digital, literacy and numeracy skills”) which provides an individual baselinetest to detect low literacy and low numeracy, educational materials regarding these topics, materials to present (via video, audio incl. concepts) the ‘digital’ services of social and public (governmental) organisations and provides a roadmap, in which all social and public (governmental) organisations in the local region applicable for this target group are categorized, can be found and contacted. This means the RED platform will be set-up as an innovative instrument, which teaches digital skills, tackles low literacy and low numeracy to finally increase social participation and empower the target group! These materials will be put on the platform, where by means of simple icons (or pictograms), and using the 'flipped classroom' method (whereby online classical instructions are offered in videos with voice explanation, written concepts and additional materials This three-dimensional approach (a combination of a voice-over, screen recordings such as the cursor of a mouse moving across the screen or clicking on something, and reading basic language concepts) will be offered online on the RED platform for all socially relevant themes that remain inaccessible (in all completeness) for the low literate, low numerate and low digitally proficient audience. By being able to hear the explanation, see and read, but also to continuously repeat (replay), stop when necessary and use it at any time and place - the information suits this group very well and is more sustainable! Finally, the explanation of each part will also be provided in a hand-out (with the focus on the same icons, images, language concepts and narrative) presented as a download-able file on the platform. The innovative nature of the RED platform is that this platform provides information in threefold and empowers the target group namely regarding their self-sufficiency. Not one platform offers the combination of the following elements, including the focus on self-sufficiency, autonomous learning opportunities, commitment and reinforcement. A European offer for this target group, including all relevant stakeholders and information on this level is not provided yet. Eventhough this problem is recognized all across Europe and it is therefore important to develop a format throughout Europe that can be applied, offered and maintained throughout this union of course with a local / regional and national subject implementations on low literacy and numeracy and digital skills development can be used directly because they are international.

We live in a world which is increasingly governed by information. It flows in every direction and imprints on every aspect of our professional and social lives. Information is also the key ingredient in education and training. This is why it is very important that we can rely on its accuracy so that we can make our decisions, form opinions, produce arguments, participate in positive debates. Yet there are those who, willingly, produce disinformation. Their objective is to deceive, to confuse, to spread fear and uncertainty. And there are others who, unwillingly, help them by repeating what they believe is true, spreading disinformation. And form opinions which are misinformed, and, ultimately, believe things that are not true to be true. We believe that education and training contexts should be free from misinformation and disinformation. And that we should try and find ways to avoid being consciously or unconsciously manipulated. That's why we created De Facto. It is our way of putting science in service of educators to improve the quality of teaching and learning. This is an oversimplification of very complex processes which Cognitive Science has began to understand in the last few decades, but which remain unknown to the wider audience. Cognitive science tells us how our brains receive and process information, how they decide which information to keep, and which to reject, which are the factors that weigh in when we decide whether to believe an information or its source, how our brains make a lot of decisions for us and without us even consciously knowing that this is happening. We have identified four major scientific concepts, the four pillars around which we built our project:> Frames (Batheson, Lakoff)> Systemic Causality (Lakoff)> Motivated Cognition (Hughes, Zaki)> Equivalency and Emphasis Frames (Chong, Druckman).We have developed explanatory texts and examples on these pillars to make them easier to understand, and made sure that these pillars underpinned the entirety of our work on the project deliverables. That brings consistency, reliability, validity and scientific backing to the method. Based on these 4 pillars, we developed a comprehensive resource base and a toolbox for educators which will consist of: - A full-blown Framework with classification of types of misinformation and disinformation, education-related layers, harmful impact assessment, and the Eggshell model for source- and fact-checking - A digital and an analog game demonstrating the detection algorithms challenges and limitations - Disinformation case studies, a rich collection of around 40 individual ready-to-use lesson plans in 7 major categories - Disinformation production kit for leading learners through the mindset and techniques of those who produce disinformation - Guidebook to fact-based reading and teaching with focus on the cognitive science pillars, ready-to-use examples, and a guide on how to use each of De Facto resources and tools - Blueprint for the entire project, so that other professionals can replicate and expand on our work- A set of cognitive cards (digital and printed/paper-based) to assist educators and learners in any activities under the De Facto method We have conducted 4 trainings for educators where we demonstrated the 4 pillars and how they work, and we presented the rich collection of resources and tools which we have developed. We reached directly 43 educators (a total of 87 training mobilities, with participants in C1-C2 also attending the advanced level course (C3-C4). In the Multiplier events, we reached directly a further 268 (with 140 initially planned) educators and stakeholders - 42 in 2 physical events, 226 in webinars. Further, we have started the process of sending these resources and tools directly to adult, SE, HE and VET education and training organisations. We already see that after the educators - when they set a new learning project or assignment - demonstrate how powerful they are, the learners willingly adjust their behaviors and habits with regard to information they receive and produce. We are seeing (albeit in smaller scale due to Covid-19 school closures and restrictions) cascading impact effects on their immediate contact circle (incl. family, friends, local communities). The behavioural change is also very prominent.