PROMOTE is a EU-funded project that started in 2014 and will be completed in October 2016. The project aims at promoting and validating social, personal and organisational key competences such as entrepreneurship, civic competences and learning to learn with the help of an innovative, self-directed learning approach at the interface of higher education and business.
The project starts from the consideration that social and personal key competences are hardly to be acquired in lectures, frontal teaching and self-learning. The ideal learning contexts to develop these competences are informal/non-formal learning contexts such as learning in mobility and in traineeships. However, up to now only singular attempts have been made to assess these competences, to give evidence of their development in the learning activity, to connect them to existing certification systems and to offer a European wide validation approach.
PROMOTE aims to develop and pilot an approach to tackle this issue based on a long term partnership of academia, business and educational partners from all over Europe. To this end, the project has developed a holistic, ICT-supported and competence oriented learning and validation system that is applied in traineeships at the interface of academia and business.
At present, PROMOTE traineeships are being carried out by students from 7 universities in businesses or enterprises of different EU member-states (with students having the opportunity to travel to other EU countries to undergo their placement). The innovative momentum of these traineeships is that students will work along a combined project management and self-directed learning approach – each trainee has to plan, develop and assess his/her project which is heading towards at least one of these key competences.
The competences (intercultural, entrepreneurial and mentoring competences) acquired during the preparatory training and the mobility will be validated and documented through the innovative LEVEL5 methodology, developed by the network REVEAL. The LEVEL5 system is specifically designed to assess personal, social and organisational competence developments in rather non- and informal learning settings. It is based on a 3-dimensional approach to the validation of cognitive, activity related and affective learning outcomes – the LEVEL5 cube and represents a holistic learning process that benefits the learner, learning providers and host entrepreneurs.
Through this system, the project will contribute to promoting and valuing those competences and learning outcomes that are of fundamental importance in our economy and that are acquired to a large extent in non-formalised learning contexts.
If you want to know more about PROMOTE and the upcoming project results, you can visit the project website.