Under the title “Adult education on European social dialogue in the digital era”, 17 education officers from trade unions and employee representatives from six countries met from July 15 to 16, 2021 for a seminar held by the Nell Breuning House in Medulin (Croatia). These 17 face-to-face participants were supplemented by 4 online participants from Italy and Belgium. The seminar was organised with the support of EZA and the European Union.
During the course, the theoretical basics of the changed learning setting (changed learning habits and expectations of the learners, The “NEW NORMAL” with new requirements and opportunities, influencing factors on educational processes) and the fundamentals of digital teaching and learning (educational process, educational organisation, digital fluency and digital readiness ) were presented.
In a second step, the stages of digital learning (distribution, interaction, collaboration) were addressed using various concepts (enrichment, integration and virtualisation concept).
The next step was digital teaching variants (from the flipped classroom to gamification and teaching videos to virtual reality) to additional tools and energisers (from Zoom to Jitsi and Kialo to Miral, Padlet and Thinglink)
Theadult educator and head of the Academy for Scientific Further Education at the Technical University of Cologne, Ilona Arcaro, created an overview on all topics and also worked on application-oriented.
At the end of the first day, Ms. Arcaro and Norbert Klein from the EZA Secretariat discussed the special requirements in the context of multilingual units for seminar planning.
On the second day, the practice-oriented part of the seminar was this time more about which digital tools can be used to maintain communication between trade unions and works councils in times of limited contact options. In addition, seminar concepts were developed based on the theories and tools presented. Attention was paid to the special aspect of “European seminars with different languages, origin of the participants and learning needs”, but the dialogue on-site (trade union education work in times of a pandemic) was also discussed. The plans presented were then discussed with the expert and further suggestions were made.
In the last part of the seminar, Slobodan Antovski and his colleagues from UNASM from North Macedonia explained the special challenges of digitised educational work for employee organisations (for example for North Macedonia) and presented corresponding surveys and experiences.