The BRIGHTS “Boosting Global Citizenship Education using digital storytelling” purpose is to promote Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in formal and non-formal Education with the help of digital storytelling (DS) techniques, leading to more socially inclusive Education and training policies and practices in Europe.

The project’s main objectives were

1. to build teachers’ and trainers’ capacity to implement GCE with young people using digital storytelling techniques, and
2. to empower young people to develop social, civic and intercultural competences as well as critical thinking, media literacy, creativity and digital skills. In practice, young people will produce digital stories on Global Citizenship topics.

Now that the project is almost ending, what is the outcome?

A MOOC under the title “Addressing Global Citizenship Education through Digital Storytelling” has been delivered to more than 1000 secondary school teachers and trainers working with young people. Its content is available to anyone interested in GCE and its application through digital storytelling through the project website.

The online training has been completed with face-to-face workshops where teachers and trainers had the chance to test the BRIGHTS methodology to then be able to implement it directly with young people (13-19 years old).

This was the core project activity during which the students have been engaged in the production of digital stories on GCE topics. Heartwarming but also engaging digital stories have been produced by our youngsters. Each of them gave its personal point of view on different and relevant topics such as inclusion, racism etc, bringing in its digital product a bit of its story and culture. All digital stories produced can be watched through the project website.

Through the production of digital stories, students have been empowered to combat radicalization and social exclusion and develop social, civic, and intercultural competences as well as critical thinking, media literacy, creativity and digital skills.

To crystallise these meaningful results and have a further impact, Policy Recommendations have been produced. They address policy makers as well as educators and trainers.

We hope that although the BRIGHTS Project is coming to an end, its results will continue to foster and promote Global Citizenship Education among youngsters as well as teachers, trainers and European citizens!

Socius is a non-profit organisation for socio-cultural adult work.

The venue is situated on the 4^th floor with a nice view of the north side of Brussels.

The target groups for the multiplier event were Face2Face workshop participants, external experts, teachers, youth workers and trainers from formal, non-formal and informal educational field. The core of the event was to present the Brights project and the policy recommendations that came out of the project. Around 20 people took part in the event.

During the Brights multiplier event Jochem Devens, Multimedia animator at Maks vzw and national BRIGHTS tutor for Belgium, presented the BRIGHTS project and the policy recommendations.

The event started with a PowerPoint presentation and 3 Digital Stories from the project.

• OKAN Sint-Guido Instituut – Saïd
• Kevin Malnar – It is all the same to me
• Wannes Hendrik – Wannes

One of the participants, Ann De Martelaer, who also followed the MOOC and the Face2Face-workshops, had a surprise for us: She made Digital Stories with adults with disabilities who are looking for real, paid jobs. Even though the story is not eligible for the Brights project because the maker of the story is already 25 years old, it was very valuable to show this story because it shows the power of Digital Storytelling. Anneleen, a woman with Down Syndrom dreams about working as a fashion model.

Here’s a link to the beautiful story:

For the second part after the presentation and videos, a discussion about the project and its policy recommendations was held.

Printouts of the recommendations were laid out in front of the participants to start the discussions.

How can Digital Storytelling be used for an audience of youngsters who are not very motivated to be in formal or non-formal education and for whom GCE is very abstract? How can the project reach more secondary schools, teachers, staff, policy makers?

School teachers should be able to follow the MOOC and F2F workshops during their hours of in-service training. It could be offered through the education networks to make it more available.

The project fits into the pedagogic future where not only ICT skills, digital infrastructure are important but also another way of teaching is crucial: the teacher as a coach, working in groups, independent researching by students, peer-to-peer method, …

As the Flemish government is in the process of adopting the Paris Declaration from 2015 and implementing Global Citizenship Education, the BRIGHTS-project can be a best practice to work with in many more schools in Brussels and Flanders.

For sure, to be continued…

Main findings from the discussion include the urgency to equip University students with the essential skills to tackle Global Citizenship issues and main cutting-edge challenges. If a set of initiatives have been conducted at primary and secondary schools, the academic world seems to be distant from this theme.

The participants conveyed on the need to find a proper space to include Global Citizenship Education in both formal and non-formal training and they proposed to connect it with the work-linked training.

The participants expressed also their interest to benefit from the BRIGHTS online course in order to increase their competences on global education and digital education.

Finally, following some questions by the participants, the debate also focused on licences and copyright issues, which is a sensitive subject for those who create and share their stories and for those who benefit from them

Zagorka Prce Veseli presented the BRIGHTS project and the results which were accomplished during the project on National and European level. In more detail she described the methodology of education of youth workers and teachers, methodology of digital storytelling, the specifics of working with youngsters on Global Citizenship topics and the importance of development and application of digital knowledge and skills. After the presentation, there was a discussion about the possibilities for application of already developed methodology in order to teach children and youth about other topics besides GC and about what other digital and technical skills could be used for educating youth for Global Citizenship.

After the discussion, Olivera Stanić presented the project’s conclusions about the needs of educators in the field of Global Citizenship Education on National level and the recommendations about how to approach to the decision makers in order to reach needed impact for further development of GCE. After the presentation, participants have agreed with the conclusions and discussed about the ways they could act together towards the decision makers. In addition, everyone agreed that they will discuss the possibility of disseminating project results within their associations by using the developed methodology, but also by developing other digital methods of Global Citizenship Education.

In the end, Olivera Stanić presented the Unite-IT platform. All of the participants have welcomed the existence of such a platform and stated that they see a great value in the platform for the networking and learning from other individuals and organizations.

The event was full of digital stories, sound and laughter, as several young digital story creators, from 10 to 19 years old, were present to receive their certificates of excellence for their innovative and GCE-oriented stories. Their teachers, from formal and non-formal education, were there as well to celebrate with them and share the challenges they faced as they trained their students about Global Citizenship Education Values and Digital Storytelling Methodology.

During the event, Mr. Faldamis, welcomed the participants and wished even more projects like BRIGHTS to be implemented in Greece. Then, the two National Tutors, Mr. Patselis and Mrs. Skoulaki presented the results of the  BRIGHTS Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Addressing Global Citizenship Education through Digital Storytelling”, as well as the BRIGHTS Training Programme to trainers and students. Following their presentation, Mrs. Aspioti, highlighted dissemination and exploitation activities and presented ways of promoting the BRIGHTS project results after its completion.

During the second part, the lights went off, and the four finalist digital stories were presented to the public. Participants were fascinated by the depths of the imagination of the young learners and were moved by their stories’ topics. There were themes about War, about Adoption by Same Gender Couples, about Gender Equality and about Refugees; all given by a more gentle and innocent aspect, the one of a child’s.

As soon as the presentation was over, the silence from retrospect was filled by the voice of the teachers, who were responsible to engage their students into creating digital stories regarding Global Citizenship Education principles. The teachers talked about their challenges and their concerns during the training. However, they all talked about how the children became from passive to active, how even the most “difficult” children became involved and cooperated with their classmates.

But why did this happen? It was because the students were able to express their inner voice and to talked about sensitive subjects using pictures, drawings or even play-doh.

Older students worked with younger as their mentors and helped promoting a supportive network during the whole process. Other groups helped foreign students, who were unable to speak Greek, to read and participate to the story as well. So we believe that the project was successful. What a better way to learn about Global Citizenship Education than implementing its values through cooperation, respect, support, and encouragement to speak your own voice?

And a message from a young student…”this is the opportunity for all grown-ups to learn about Global Citizenship Education and see things differently, because so far they have only seen with their own eyes and their own interests”.

Moderators: Barbara Quarta, ALL DIGITAL; Luca Pagliaricci, Centro Studi Foligno

The current global scenario requires education and training institutions to assume greater responsibility than ever in helping learners of all backgrounds to develop into informed, critically literate, socially-connected, ethical and engaged global citizens. Nowadays, it is crucial that we give young people the competences and the voice to share their own perspective in a globalised society.

The topic of the session was implementing Global Citizenship Education (GCE) among young people using digital storytelling in formal and non-formal education. Experience, lessons learnt and recommendations from the BRIGHTS project were presented.

Barbara Quarta introduced and moderated the session, while Luca Pagliaricci shared his experience as a BRIGHTS national tutor in Italy. Moderators presented the findings from the BRIGHTS Experimentation Report, which summarises the results of the implementation of the BRIGHTS MOOC and face-to-face workshops in the project countries. Few examples of BRIGHTS digital stories produced by young people were also shown during the session. The young authors who took part in the session, talked about their experience. Session participants discussed how the methodology and results can be disseminated, scaled, and used by other digital competence centres or networks.

See the PowerPoint presentation used during the session here (.pdf)

How the BRIGHTS methodology and results can be used by other digital competence centres?

• The full BRIGHTS blended training course (MOOC + F2F workshops) can be localised and fully integrated in the training offer of digital competence centres working with young people.
• The BRIGHTS MOOC can be localised and integrated with new contents (on different topics).
• The project methodology can be used focusing only on a specific selected topic: e.g. sustainable development, human rights or hate-speech by producing online hate-speech counter-narratives.
• The project methodology can be adapted to a different target group: e.g. promoting social inclusion of refugees and migrants or other groups at risk of social exclusion.
• The project methodology can be used in digital competence centres to train e-facilitators working with adults and young people.
• The BRIGHTS digital stories can be used to raise awareness on GCE topics through a national or European online/offline campaign.
• The project methodology can be scaled up: BRIGHTS results can be complemented with other results from other local/national/European projects or initiatives and tested in different countries.
• Further funding opportunities can be identified at national and European level to further promote GCE and digital storytelling.

Participants concluded that the BRIGHTS methodology is very innovative and has a lot of potential for scaling up in different contexts and with different target groups.

For further interaction, ideas and communication, visit the online community on Global Citizenship Education on UNITE-IT. The community has over 100 members and anybody interested in the topic is invited to join.

The 2018 Symposium of the EU-CoE youth partnership focused on exploring the intersection between social inclusion of young people and digitalisation, reflecting especially on how digitalisation affects young people’s lives, and what the role of youth policy, youth work and youth research can be in this respect.

The BRIGHTS project results were presented during the interactive workshop on “Combating discrimination in the digital space, hate speech, cyber-bullying and harassment” which was held on 27 of June. The project was also promoted through copies of project leaflets and the BRIGHTS Info Kit on Global Citizenship Education distributed to the participants. Moreover, BRIGHTS, was included in the Compendium of Practices published by EU-CoE Youth Partnership.

Finally, we have the final version of the compendium! Have a look and find our BRIGHTS Project!

]]> https://www.brights-project.eu/en/the-final-version-of-the-compendium-of-practices-has-been-published-by-the-eu-coe-youth-partnership-brights-is-in-it/feed/ 0 https://www.brights-project.eu/en/digital-storytelling-day-with-more-than-50-youngsters-in-brussels/ https://www.brights-project.eu/en/digital-storytelling-day-with-more-than-50-youngsters-in-brussels/#respond Thu, 06 Dec 2018 07:38:38 +0000 http://www.brights-project.eu/?p=2175 […]]]> On Tuesday November 13^th, with Maks we organized a Digital Storytelling Day for more than 50 youngsters in Brussels. Goal of the day: Every student makes his/her digital story related to GCE in one day! Did we reach our goal or not?  You’ll find out at the end

With this post I want to share our experiences, our mistakes, what we’ve learned from it and hopefully provide you with some tips and tricks that may help you when working with Digital Storytelling with youngsters.

Our event took place at the Cureghem cellars in Anderlecht. http://www.abattoir.be/en/cellars

An enchanting place, a huge cellar more than 100 years old. It was once used for growing mushrooms last century and has now become a popular venue for events.

The students came from two Flemish Dutch-speaking schools in Brussels: Anneessens Funck and GO for business De Toverfluit. 9^th and 10^th grade.

These are schools with a super diverse public: youngsters from all backgrounds, some of them born here, others just arrived two years ago. The Dutch language is one of the big challenges for these students, since it is rarely their mother language. It is their second, third or even fourth language. Formal classical education is a rough path for most of them and by the age of 16-17, motivation for going to school is on a low level. Instead of having 4 to 5 sessions of 4 hours, we made it very compact to get sooner to the concrete action, something we’ve noticed is necessary in previous workshops with our target group.

For this day, we decided to mix and divide all students into 6 different groups each with their own topic related to GCE: Family, friends, lifestyle, habitat, my future and my history. The idea was to start from the student and his environment and to make a link with GCE in a second phase.

After a quick introduction of the day, we started in our different groups. Trainers and teachers guided the youngsters through the day.

It started with a round of Dixit where all cards are on a table and everyone has to pick a card which he/she likes or can relate to. Afterwards everyone tells why he/she picked this particular card.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dixitgame.jpg

I’ll have to be honest: these youngsters 16-17 years old are not very eager to talk about themselves in a group. As a trainer, you constantly have to try and motivate them, ask questions, more questions and more questions.

Even though we tried to make GCE close to the student and the time framing very compact, lacking motivation was a huge challenge this day. How to motivate and involve the students into GCE and Digital Storytelling was really the key question of this day.

After our round of Dixit we went to the topic of each group.

We prepared some questions, each student had about half an hour to think about these questions and to answer them. This exercise was not about writing, spelling or grammar, it served merely as a starting point for our story circle afterwards.

Not only talking in group but also listening to each other is not easy. It demanded great effort from trainers and teachers and from students as well.

But almost all students had their short story and their storyboard ready before lunchbreak. Short personal stories, about half a minute till one minute long…

The afternoon started with a brief but excellent presentation from Jasper from Maks about iMovie and looking up pictures on internet. He’s also the star from the Brights Module 4 where he guides you through the technical aspects of making a Digital Story ( https://vimeo.com/manage/albums/4856060 )

After this, we went back to our different groups and each student received an iPad to start making their own digital story. This part of the process went easier, students could work individual on a tablet and a concrete result came out of it. They used their drawings and pictures from the internet for their stories, they recorded their voice and edited all on their iPad.

But it is the content they had to come up with during the morning session which can seem too abstract, that made it possible to create a digital story this fast.

You can find all the results on our Vimeo (only in Dutch):

Some things we’ve learned from this day:

• Provide a clear schedule of the day for the students (it took some time after breaks for some students to come back)
• Mixing students from different school is a challenge and can create conflicts which makes it harder to focus on the content
• It stays hard to get the attention of students for GCE.
• As a trainer you have to stay motivated all the time even if you receive little to no feedback at the beginning. Eventually interesting ideas and stories will come out.
• As a trainer, you have to keep looking for those ideas and keep believing something will come up
• It is not easy for the youngsters we worked with to share their opinion in a group.
• The location was not ideal: the huge cellars were a temptation for the youngsters to wonder around instead of focusing on their digital story.
• Working with specific themes within the frame of GCE works well. It makes it easier to focus. But one should keep the possibility open to open up the themes if the group wants this.
• Preparing questions in advance is very important. It’s the trainer’s guide for the story circle. Also make sure to have more questions in your head you can ask during the story circle. These questions will inspire others in the circle as well.
• Be prepared on the technical level. Our colleagues from the technical department went one day in advance to install extra Wi-Fi-routers. All iPads were charged, and every iPad had the proper logos and proper credits already installed.

And to come back to the beginning: did we reach our goal of having all students make their own digital story? Almost, but not completely. We, the students, teachers and trainers, did a very good job! But for a couple of students it did not work out.  Where this one-day workshop formula worked in many ways, it also has the disadvantage of not being able to make time for students who need extra attention or guidance. And anyone can have a bad day, not only youngsters. After all, we’re not only Global Citizens, we’re all humans in the first place.

We continue to work with Digital Storytelling. We keep believing it is a very good way to reach youngsters, to inspire conversations, to have discussions, to share stories.

I am very curious to hear from other trainers and teachers from all over the world: what are your thoughts and experiences? What are do’s and don’ts ?

The BRIGHTS project is financially supported by the European Commission through the Erasmus + program. In the last two years the project was conducted in Belgium, Greece, Italy and Croatia with the aim of promoting Global Citizenship Education in formal and non-formal education through the method of digital storytelling. Teachers, professors, youth workers, and non-formal sector trainers have adopted a project methodology developed by an international partner consortium and then educated more than 1,000 students who have created digital stories. You can view their digital stories on the YouTube channel of the BRIGHTS project. s The public had a chance to view the stories of the Croatian students on the big screen at Art-kino Croatia.

Authors of the best digital stories and their mentors received awards. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Malnar is the author of the best Croatian story “It’s all the same to me…”, where he brings his own vision of life on the Croatian-Slovenian border, which has been divided by a barbed wire since the beginning of the refugee crisis. Kevin’s mentor is professor of Primary School “Petar Zrinski” Čabar Tanja Šebalj-Kocet. Kevin and Tanja together with the team of the Centre of Technical Culture Rijeka, the association that implemented the project in Croatia, participated in October as Croatian representatives at ALL DIGITAL summit, which this year was dedicated to the topic of digital storytelling.

KEVIN’s story:

BRIGHTS national tutors Hana Galogaža Lanča and Sanjin Smajlović from CTC Rijeka, who mentored Croatian educators in mastering the BRIGHTS methodology and practical work with youth, presented the BRIGHTS methodology. As the strongest quality of the BRIGHTS methodology, tutors emphasized the power to empower an individual who is telling his digital story as well as motivating viewers at the same. They also added that the strong power of this methodology is its ability to apply to different topics and contexts.

BRIGHTS methodology

The BRIGHTS international consortium has recognized digital storytelling as an excellent tool for dealing with topics in the area of education for global citizenship because of its simplicity and attractiveness among young people. A digital story is a short form of digital communication that not only allows individuals to exchange their everyday experiences, but also promotes understanding among people of different ethnic or religious backgrounds, beliefs, points out stereotypes, promotes intercultural dialogue and empowers critical thinking, as well as computer and media literacy.

In Croatia the BRIGHTS methodology was embraced by 169 representatives of the non-formal and formal education sector (professors, non-graduate school staff, NGO representatives, trainers …) and over 1200 across Europe. They learned the methodology through the massive online open course “Access to Education for Global Citizenship through Digital storytelling”. The MOOC was awarded in October as the best digital resource for educators in the pan-European network ALL DIGITAL.

Following the successful completion of the massive online open course, participants were given the opportunity to join the practical part of the project, which included a workshop for them and a workshop with young people from 13 to 19 years of age. In Croatia, 26 educators were included in the workshop, which transferred their knowledge to over 300 Croatian young people. Watch and share their digital stories here!

Educators Mirjana Jerković and Ivana Kovač, professors of Primary School “Tin Ujević” Osijek, shared their experience of participating in the BRIGHTS project and the practical application of the BRIGHT methodology with the young people. They emphasized that despite the poor equipment of the school and the end of the school year, they managed to hold workshops with students who had no problems embracing the methodology and making their digital stories. They are going to continue to use the methodology, and in this school year we can expect new digital stories from Osijek.

The methodology was praised by the employees of the Department of Education of the City of Rijeka, Lana Golob and Mirela Pašić, who stated that it can easily applied to the teaching methods of Civic Education. They presented the Rijeka model of civic education that is expanding over Croatia and once again emphasized that the themes and approaches that encourage tolerance, nonviolence, and understanding of diversity today are extremely needed for Croatian society.

The event “Students – Global citizens” was held as part of the Global Education Week (19^th-25^th November 2018). If you are interested in education for global citizenship, we invite you to join the first European community that brings together experts, practitioners and others interested in the topic on the Unite-IT platform, which was also developed through the BRIGHTS project.

About the expert:

Bill Vassiliadis is an Associate Professor at the Technical Educational Institute of Western Greece. He received his Engineering Diploma (in 1995) and his Ph.D. (in 2003, in Information Retrieval), both from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, Univ. of Patras, Greece. Bill is a Project and Quality Manager of DAISSy (Dynamic Ambient Intelligent Sociotechnical Systems) Research Group at the Hellenic Open University. Since 1998, he has participated as a researcher in several EU and national R&D projects. His research interests in MOOCs include quality design and standardization issues.

The workshop:

The aim of this workshop was to give participants an overview of the current MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) trends, design and development challenges and distance learning quality issues. Bill Vassiliadis gave an interactive presentation where open issues on MOOC design and development were discussed. Practical examples gave participants the opportunity to gain an in-depth view of problems and possible solutions.

Target Audience:

Target groups of this workshop included MOOC designers, HE policy makers and strategists, students and other learners in general, as well as teaching staff (teachers, facilitators). Furthermore, National Government and EU policy bodies, regional/national and international associations in the sectors of Education and Quality Assurance were targeted.

Why MOOCs and what’s different about them?

During the last years, MOOCs became very popular. Since the year 2008, when the first MOOC was provided, the number of MOOCs is constantly increasing. The year 2012 was considered as the “Year of the MOOCs” leading to an increasing debate about their quality as an education tool. The following are the main characteristics of a MOOC:

• Massive: very large number of (active) users with reduced interaction between tutor and learners.
• Open: free course, in some mixed models there is only a fee for getting the certificate/badge.
• Online Course: the course structure is usually weekly with extensive use of videos, automatic assessment and tools for group working and sharing.

What is a mini-MOOC?

A mini-MOOC is a 2-4-week course and can be used for introducing basic topics (e.g. introduction to Social Inclusion) and/or for helping to take a decision (e.g. what bachelor degree should I choose?). It could be a shortened version of a full-scale MOOC.

What are the pros and cons of MOOCs?

For learners:

• Pros: free of charge; flexible; many course offerings/availability.
• Cons: no accreditation; they do not cover a topic in depth; flexibility which can be also a disadvantage because learners learn at their own pace; high drop-out rate (usually 60%); lack of interaction.

For organisations:

• Pros: the MOOC hype and the re-use of open learning knowledge/resources.
• Cons: business model (usually free); hidden costs; difficult to change.

Mostly two different types of MOOCs can be differentiated: the cMOOCs, based on principles from connectivist pedagogy according to which the content should be aggregated rather than pre-selected and remixable; and the xMOOCs, based on a more traditional course structure.

How can we make a successful MOOC?

• To have a successful MOOC, we should first choose a MOOC theme that interests a (large) target group and make sure that learners have something to gain, not just “knowledge”. How do you know the specific needs of your target group? You can run a pre-evaluation anonymous survey directly involving the target group before designing the MOOC.
• MOOC contents are extremely important: content quality makes the difference! Also, the curriculum should be carefully designed with progressive learning.
• Another important aspect to consider is the role of MOOC Tutors and Facilitators. The key factor is the motivation of the users to interact among them and create a community, hence the facilitation strategy is very important.
• Course duration and structure should be clear to the learners. Especially the week and the module structure are very important: goals, definition of key concepts, videos, additional resources, assignments, additional resources, etc. For each week, it is good to have a description of goals and skills stated using the Bloom taxonomy (learning outcomes).
• Content should have the minimum overload: lots of block available (too many are too confusing); clear indications on what to do next and clear signs on what a resource is (e.g. additional of core content).
• Course assessment should be fair and clear to the learners.

Overall pitfalls/ lessons learned/ tips and tricks:

The diversity of current trends in the MOOC field resulting from much different approaches being followed in what concerns the concept, the pedagogical design, the learning environment design and the business model, has made this a much complex subject for research. There are several lessons to be learned from current MOOC practice, including the following:

During the Analysis phase:

• How to identify an appropriate target group and its needs.
• How to allow for the widening of participation in education. This means, for instance, to provide opportunities for the learners to prepare and train for the learning environment and the methodology used.

During the Design phase:

• How to identify the right pedagogical design approach.
• How to identify the appropriate LMS solution depending on own needs.
• How to reach a consensus between cost and openness, flexibility and personalization (which the MOOC provides for allowing different learners to be able to build their own learning paths and to match them to their personal expectations and conditions. Participants in MOOCs are all there for different reasons and have different motivations). A good MOOC design is one which allows the replication of the services provided to an increasingly higher number of users for just a marginal cost.

During the Development phase:

• How to effectively develop effective educational material.
• How to design fair on-line assessment activities.

During the Enactment phase:

• How to attract and pre-register users.
• How to keep users interested during the course.
• How to handle drop-outs during the first week/module of the course.

What did participants gain though the workshop?

In this workshop participants learned about current MOOC trends, design and development challenges and distance learning quality issues. Hands-on activities guided participants through the various steps of MOOC-Analysis, MOOC-Design and MOOC-Implementation. The workshop was suitable for all levels of experience with e-learning. The range of case studies introduced helped participants see ways in which MOOCs and mini-MOOCs can be used in a range of contexts to promote learning and knowledge dissemination.

Where to find more information online/ good online resources?

You may find more material on MOOCs in the following sources:

• The presentation Bill Vassiliadis gave during the workshop
• MOOQ– the European Alliance for Quality of MOOCs
• The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU)
• UNESCO declarations on Open Educational Resources (OER)
• European Commission “Opening Up Education” Agenda

This workshop was supported by the BRIGHTS project.

The MOOC “Addressing Global Citizenship Education through Digital Storytelling” has been developed in the framework of the European project BRIGHTS, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The MOOC contents and platform have been developed by Maks vzw, Guglielmo Marconi University and Hellenic Open University under the coordination of ALL DIGITAL from Belgium, and in collaboration with project partners Centre of Technical Culture Rijeka (CTC Rijeka), Centro Studi Foligno (CSF) and Hellenic Professionals Informatics Society (HePIS). The BRIGHTS MOOC was delivered in Belgium, Croatia, Greece and Italy.

During this 4-week online course, trainees wgained a thorough understanding of how to design and apply the Story Circle Methodology to implement Global Citizenship Education (GCE) using Digital Storytelling (DS) technique with young people both in schools and in non-formal educational contexts. The MOOC responds to crucial training needs that are emerging among young people, such as intercultural and cross-cultural skills, critical thinking, collaborative and project-based learning, creativity and digital literacy. Course participants acquired the knowledge needed to meet the global challenges emerging in contemporary society, including sustainable development and lifestyle, social inclusion and cultural diversity, gender equality, peace and human rights, active citizenship and democracy, and learned how to engage young people in the production of digital stories on these challenges.

To learn more about the BRIGHTS MOOC click here

Contacts of speakers for follow up questions

Dr. Bill Vassiliadis, DAISSY Research Group of Hellenic Open University. Email: bb@eap.gr