NEET-Idea

NEET IDEA – Supporting Digital Native NEET’s Back to Mainstream Education, Training and Employment

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Welcome to the NEET IDEA project. What has the NEET IDEA project
achieved? NEET IDEA supports digital native NEET’s to reintegrate into
mainstream education, training, and employment. This project targets
young adults between the ages of 20-34 who are on the margins of
mainstream society – these young people are often classed as NEETs i.e.
Not in Employment, Education or Employment.

The NEET IDEA project provided learners with the opportunity to up-skill on
the topic of digital and social media production. By working with educators,
the project promoted bespoke non-formal learning resources around digital
and social media production. By offering learning materials that appeal to
young digital natives, NEET IDEA encouraged participants to develop useful
skills, develop behaviours, and change attitudes towards re-entering
education, employment, or training in the future.

About Us

During the NEET IDEA project, participants were exposed to researching, story-boarding, scripting, planning, designing, presenting, shooting, editing and producing short films. NEET IDEA opened many doors to learning for young people, due to the vast range of roles involved in media production. This project helped young people overcome their personal fears and barriers to educative resources. This encouragement was furthered by the ability for participants to accredit their learning, and increased their motivation to continue through an Open Badges Framework.

NEET IDEA focused on empowering young adult NEET’s with skills and attitudes that promote personal growth and fulfilment. This project promoted the building of self-confidence and self-esteem by working in team environments, being respected and respecting others. The NEET IDEA project gave young adults the opportunity to become part of a film crew by encouraging learners to make different types of short films, entitled “My Dream Job”. These productions varied between; comedy sketches, documentaries, mockumentaries, short films with a serious theme, etc. all produced from the comfort of their smartphones! These productions can be viewed on the NEET IDEA YouTube page:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8X5Dbog4mM_9pmbVGptVVxLnrpWmSTCD

NEET IDEA also worked to build an understanding of digital environments for adult educators, in order to enable and facilitate them in working with today’s young digital natives, who have technology embedded in their everyday routine. NEET IDEA acknowledged how important it is for different generations to unite and work together, in order to promote learning and employment among young people

Throughout the course of the NEET IDEA project, we trained adult educators to utilise and become familiar with a range of bespoke learning approaches to engage young adult NEET’s to build their confidence and competences. By exploring non-formal methods of education, educators pursued many methods of supporting young adults to re-engage in education and to take the first steps in planning careers in the digital and social media sectors. This project encouraged educators to learn and enact embedded-learning approaches to connect and engage with NEET’s, to support their reintegration into education, employment, or training.

Project Number:

2020-1-LT01-KA204-077837

Our Partners

NEET IDEA has been funded with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme. The NEET IDEA project commenced in October 2020 and will run until July 2022. NEET IDEA is currently being delivered by a team of seven organisations from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ireland, Poland, and Spain.

VSI Inovaciju Biuras (Lithuania)

VSI Inovaciju Biurus (VSI Innovation Office) is the coordinator of the NEET IDEA project. They are an organisation based in Lithuania who aim to create supportive environments that promote activity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. This organisation seeks to empower young people and heavily supports youth entrepreneurship. They understand the importance of ‘learning by doing’ and encourage young people to gain real life experience through internships and voluntary work. VSI’s aim is to act as an “incubator for good ideas” as they promote and encourage innovative societies.

Druzhestvo Znanie (Bulgaria)

Druzhestvo Znanie (Znanie Association) is a non-governmental organisation that was founded in 1990 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Their mission is to gather the strengths of different experts in order to implement and organise training and educational materials. In doing so, they aim to encourage personal development, professional training, and education through non-formal educational activities. Znanie Association focuses on educating and training people in every age category, in order to create more inclusive and improved societies.

AKLUB Centrum Vzdelavani a Poradenstvi (Czech Republic)

AKLUB Centrum Vzdelavani a Poradenstvi (AKLUB Centre of Education and Counselling) is an organisation founded in 1997 in The Czech Republic. AKLUB promotes services that develop educational and integrational programmes and products for professionals, experts, young people, and disadvantaged people and their families. This organisation regularly participates in national and international projects that include lifelong learning, educational practices, coaching, e-learning, distance education, counselling methods, and integration programmes. AKLUB directly implements a mixture of personal and theoretical development to improve quality of education and inclusion.

The Rural Hub (Ireland)

The Rural Hub is an Irish association founded in 2012 that provides specific training programmes in order to support and aid members of disadvantaged communities. The Rural Hub focuses on encouraging social inclusion and offering solutions that promote the integration of migrant communities and marginalised learners into mainstream education offers. Alongside this, they specialise in education, e-learning, media production, development, research, and community development. The Rural Hub aims to support greater community involvement and enhanced social inclusion by focusing on growing isolated communities. The Rural Hub runs a Digital Media Zone (DMZ) in Virginia, Ireland, where they deliver bespoke digital media production training to youth, migrant and community groups. By working on national and EU funded projects, this association has supported local youth groups, migrant communities, senior adults, and individuals who have been absent from education to re-engage with service providers and mainstream education. The Rural Hub delivers a range of diverse programmes to support the next generation of creative individuals to build and sustain successful careers.

ARPIS Asociación Regional para la Inclusion Social (Spain)

ARPIS Asociación Regional para la Inclusión Social (ARPIS Regional Association for Social Inclusion) is a Spanish organisation established in 2018. This NGO centralises on removing barriers to promote social inclusion, primarily for individuals and families from disadvantaged social backgrounds. Their 3 core areas of work are: Education, Individual Support and Networking. Through these fields, ARPIS focuses on providing formal and non-formal educational resources for all ages within the community to integrate all members of society. This organisation offers individual, professional, and volunteer-based support to unite people from different backgrounds and support more inclusive societies

Osrodek Szkoleniowo-Badawczy INNEO (Poland)

Osrodek Szkoleniowo-Badawczy INNEO (The Centre for Training and Research INNEO) is a Polish organisation. INNEO focuses on social and economic development through the fields of research, computer service training, leadership, the labour market, project management, media production and entrepreneurship. INNEO’s primary objective is to provide training and research on both local and international levels. This organisation creates learning materials, training courses and mentoring systems in order to promote young people’s integration into the labour market by increasing their competences and fighting against unemployment. INNEO is passionate about creative and innovative models of education provision to encourage learning and opportunities within the labour market.

Callidus Ustanova za Obrazovanje Odraslih (Croatia)

Callidus Ustanova za Obrazovanje Odraslih (Callidus – Institute for Adult Education) is an institute that creates and develops numerous educational programmes. Their areas of expertise are management, personal development, marketing, sales, tourism, gastronomy, finance, business, economics, and construction. Callidus are leading educational innovators who specialise in fulfilling the needs and requirements of VET learners, employees, and unemployed people. This institution implements support that motivates learners and encourages the integration of unemployed people into the labour market. Callidus’ mission is to provide innovative educational programmes and projects to address challenges that exist within the sectors of education and employment.

Learning Materials

The NEET IDEA project supported digital native NEETs back to mainstream education, training, and employment. The NEET IDEA project partners collaborated together throughout the term of the project to produce the following innovative learning materials:

In-Service Training Programme

The In-Service Training Programme explores the different roles of educators and support workers within the environment of embedded learning. It focuses on the ubiquity of online learning environments that greatly appeal to the young adult NEET target group. The face-to-face sessions focus on building the competence and confidence of educators so that they can develop digital media projects and short films with young adult NEETs in their community. It also highlights key engagement strategies that can be used to engage these hard-to-reach learners. This programme ensures that adult educators have the ability to utilise online learning resources and be comfortable in carrying out online tasks. Adult educators will be suitably trained in blended learning models of intervention, to understand the benefits of online learning and be fully aware of the risks that are associated with online environments. The NEET IDEA In-Service Training Programme contributes greatly to the development of the inclusivity of marginalised groups in many educational settings.

Compendium of Inquiry-based and Embedded-learning Resources

To accompany the blended learning initiative of this project, educators need to fully understand basic and transversal skills based in a digital and media production environment. The resources presented in this compendium motivated NEET individuals to develop their critical thinking, research skills, and organisational skills and gain insight into the implementation of digital-learning environments. Young adult NEET’s were asked to develop short films, pertaining to the central theme of “My Dream Job”. Participants had the opportunity to have their productions shown to their counterparts in seven different EU countries. This approach helped learners to discover more about themselves and learn about other individuals from their productions. The resources offer templates for the different stages of pre-production, production, and post-production which aided in their filmmaking. Individuals used this opportunity to enhance their filmmaking skills whilst cleverly introducing and analysing the concept of employment. The activities in this toolkit supported adult educators to give a voice to young adult NEETs so that they could engage with career planning processes through the medium of filmmaking. The NEET IDEA project resources proposed a mindset that encourages participants to imagine a future where employment plays a major role in their lives. If you are interested in learning more about creating films, you can find these materials on the NEET IDEA MOOC.

MOOC – Open/ Online / Digital Education – Massive Open Online Course

To continue the theme of technology, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is available for this project, to provide access to the basic skills toolkit and the in-service training resources. Adult educators who use the MOOC are able to track the levels of achievement of learners they are supporting and the learners themselves have the opportunity to build a skills portfolio by collecting the Open Badges achieved in an online skills passport. This portal is designed to support interactive learning that can be accessed on a wide variety of devices. Chat rooms, forums and messaging tools are also available on the platform to support online interaction between individual users. This platform aims to attract and enable young adult NEETs and adult educators to access the NEET IDEA project resources with ease.

Get Involved

To get involved and support our project, please find, and follow us, on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/NEETIDEAproject/

The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.