Entrepreneur+ Strategical Partnership Project
Project Leader: Hermann Ottó Institute Nonprofit Ltd (HU)
Partners: InterRegio Forum Association, Association for Hargita County (RO), Alliance for the Common Goals (SK)
Description: The tourism potential of Central- Europe is far from being exploited. While Austria hosts 12,000 tourists per 1,000 habitats each year, Hungary and Slovakia have only 2,000 visitors and Romania has even worse numbers, although in terms of tourism potential, these countries are not holding less than Austria.
Why is this happening then? Among other reasons an important factor is the reduced level of entrepreneurial skills and competences in CEE societies, first of all on the field of agro-tourism. This area typically unites entrepreneurs with lower education: most of them are not holding a college or a university degree. Studies about the vocational education in the CEE countries show that these wasted opportunities are highly connected to the training deficiencies in VET, and especially in agro-tourism and tourism in VET: the underweighting of entrepreneurship in the educational curricula; the lack of appropriate methodology and curriculum development experience; and the inflexibility of the educational systems.
In addition, it is also clear that the frontal teaching methods are not efficient when teaching entrepreneurial skills, let alone competences, specially not used in VET, where most of the students are coming from a troubled socio-cultural background, and have often serious problems with understanding written text. To address these challenges we have created a project aiming at developing a special teaching methodology to efficiently help VET students to gather entrepreneurial skills and competences. The project’s goal is to create a special blended learning methodology providing on-line and off-line tools, cross-border networking and a personal mentoring system.
We call this project Entrepreneur+, for it is referring to the m-learning based blended education methodology to be created in this project. The system will enable the students to learn using personalized learning path. Teachers will act more like “mentors”, supervising the learning process and paying personal attention to each student. We believe that such an adaptive learning approach is the most suitable way to approach the subject, and it might substantially increase the efficiency of education of entrepreneurial skills in the vocational education. In the frame of the project we will develop the innovative methodology described above, and we will test it in three countries (Hungary, Slovakia and Romania) in the frame of a pilot-training involving 60 students all-together.
The participating teachers/mentors will be previously trained and empowered to handle the innovative methodology and the digital tools. We hope to give them the feeling of a pedagogical renewal experience, as they will be involved in networking activities and creative work in m-learning curriculum development as well. We believe that by the end of the project we can achieve the following effects: an increase in the motivation of the students towards learning; an increase in their knowledge and skills in the fields of entrepreneurship; burn-out prevention through the new method for the participating teachers; the promotion of the digital and adaptive methods in the schools and in front of the decision-makers; making tourism more competitive in a long-term in the zone.
We do believe in free-sharing; therefore all of the outputs of the project (even the application) will be freely available on the project’s website, and will be disseminated “off line” as well at different events (workshops, conferences, etc.). It is our hope that project will promote a paradigm-shift in the educational policies toward digitally supported adaptive learning solutions.
By Izabella Krencsey-Élő, EUROPEA Hungary, NC
More info click HERE
