DEE-GEAYS: Digital Education Era - Global citizenship Education for Activating Youth online Space

Background DEE-GEAYS project idea was designed basing on the needs of the youth work sector to act innovatively online, first to provide a timely response towards alarming environmental challenges and offer quality online activities to reduce unessential travel; and to respond to the social challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The project idea was born in the first lockdown in 2020 when the consortium discussed obstacles youth work sector experienced in reaching effectively our target groups throughout digital tools. While observing the situation back then, we concluded that many youth workers struggled to offer young people a quality and interactive non-formal learning activities online. With this project we wanted thus to create and test a digital platform that will be a “fun learning” and we have deliberately chosen to make a platform on Global citizenship education – to promote global solidarity, fundamental values of responsibility towards the planet and empathy through social emotional learning (dimension of GCE), as in the context of pandemic it occurred to be the most important need of the communities. The platform created is open for any youth worker who wants to design and upload their courses on other topics Objectives DEE-GEAYS’ main objective was to capitalize existing knowledge, experience and creativity potential of the youth work sector for creating an innovative digital tool that will allow exploiting ICT for providing quality learning activities online (https://deegeays.com/). We wanted to create a digital learning platform that will provide a new methodological framework that embraces global citizenship education (GCED), especially important in the post pandemic times for promoting global solidarity and emotional well-being of young people. GCED is built on 3 levels: cognitive, behavioural and socio-emotional (SEL) whereas we decided to focus on SEL as today it is the most relevant response to the needs of the youth across the globe. SEL involves the development of skills that facilitate learners’ emotional welfare, ability to cope with stress, manage own emotions and understand emotions of others – our main aim was to create a digital platform that offers young people new tools for understanding GCED and acquiring SEL. To achieve it, we conducted two desk researches and basing on them created an innovative methodology, that was tested during the local labs with young people and after converted into online learning modules. Implementation The activities were subjected to logic and reaching project objectives. First the partnership implemented two joint desk researches: a research on GCED and SEL NFE methods and a research on the NFE digitalization. These steps were crucial in order to build a quality base for the IO3: an innovative NFE methodology that combined the findings from desk researches. Each partner has organized 5 local labs in order to test the methodology developed in the framework of IO3. Hence in total we organized 35 meetings with young people and in total involved over 110 youngsters from Italy, Denmark, Macedonia, Slovakia, Belgium and Spain. The partnership has analyzed the results of the labs and thanks to the feedback the IO3 (methodology) was digitalized and accordingly adapted for the digital tool (IO5) – https://deegeays.com/, the key deliverable of the project. Each partner has organized multiplier events in their countries in order to promote the use of the platform involving 279 people. In order to achieve these results the partners have participated in 5 transnational meetings and had undertaken monthly (and biweekly during pandemic/limited mobility restrictions) Zoom meetings to coordinate joint effort to achieve quality results Achievements Our project had following tangible results and intellectual outputs: 1.IO1 joint desk research on the global citizenship education and social-emotional learning non-formal learning methods (NFE); 2.IO2 joint desk research on the digitalization of NFE, including national case studies; 3.IO3 innovative non-formal learning methodology on GCE with the focus on SEL with digital learning elements; 4.Each partner implemented the 5 labs for young people in their country, to test the methodology delivered within the IO3; 5.Podcasts created following 5 learning modules from IO3 methodology (podcasts and all IOs available as resources: https://deegeays.com/static/resources.html ; 6.IO5(4) – digital platform with the open moodle course on GCE and SEL and the possibility of being further used for other courses created by the youth workers: https://deegeays.com/course/ 7.Multiplier event in each partner country that helped us to disseminate the platform around Europe. More than 110 young people have participated in the labs on that gave them skills, competences and tools to continue developing own social-emotional learning level. Currently our online platform offers these labs in digital format to anyone in the world without limitations