Educational training companies from Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia will develop a curriculum for adult educators as a result of an Eramus+ strategical cooperation project, which aims to contribute to the challenges with adults low or out of date skills.
This autumn, in September the project “Efficiency in adult learning and training” started. The project will continue almost for 2,5 years and the idea is to bring together the private sector knowledge and best practices with the end result of a curriculum and toolkit for training adult educators in formal education system. During the projects the partners will also pilot the developed curriculum. So there will be around 100 adult trainers/teachers involved in the piloting courses in Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia. Participating teachers will be more motivated, methodologically prepared and open minded to adults in their training groups.
The focus building up this curriculum is on adult learning efficiency. The project partners share a common view, that learning efficiency can be increased with the learner centred approach in the learning process. So therefore the adult trainers knowledge and methodological approaches are crucial for achieving more learning efficiency. The methodological development is focused especially on how to support developing general skills, including for example social skills, learning skills etc.
Though this project is rather an unusual example due the fact that it connects only private companies, the desired impact of this action in common sense – national and international level – is the acknowledgement of the needs that approaches to teachers role and attitudes (on methodological and target group level) has to change rapidly and fast as the profile of students is changing – there are more and more adult learners. To avoid future skills gaps it is important to acknowledge the importance of learner centred learning and learning efficiency.
The first project activity was carried out in Estonia in the beginning of October. On these days we focused on the latest research achievements of neuroscience and how to use this knowledge in training process, including how to design a training course based on that. The next meeting in 2020 will lead the partners to Latvia to experience their best practices. The project is carried out by the following partners – Kasvulava OÜ and DevelopDesign® (Loome OÜ) from Estonia, Spring Valley from Latvia and Topcoach from Slovakia. The project is funded from the Erasmus+ Programme for strategical cooperation.