28 SEP 2020
Creative Skills and Digital Education in the new Erasmus+ call
Creative skills and creative thinking have never been so present as in the recent months. Many of us lived along months confined at home. During this period of confinement, each of us used creative skills to survive our daily lives at home. This new and unknown situation, made us develop our creative thinking. That is the ability to consider something in a new perspective. So, we were able to find a new approach to problems, to solve conflicts at work, or at home, from a new angle. Thereby, working, studying, organizing your everyday life from home fostered creative abilities that many of us had forgotten.
The same, as in personal life, happened in the educational field. After the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, many schools over the world closed their classrooms to continue education at home. It is the so called virtual classroom. This urgent resource helped students and teachers to be connected online to teach or attend the lessons, do the homework, attend the virtual meetings with their classmates and surfing into Google for research activities.
Thus, after the corona outbreak, a new era was beginning both in private and public Education: digital education was emerging as a panacea to the growing necessity for teachers to find new digital platforms to help them teaching and monitoring their students. On the other hand, both pupils and parents were crying out for new means of communication with the school. A need for survival was established in education, since everyone was conscious that face-to-face classes, as they knew it until that moment, would take a long time to come back.
So coronavirus not only opened a gap in the public health system of many countries. Covid-19 also opened a large breach in education, showing that the educational system was not prepared to face a situation like the one we were living at that moment. In this way, many public and private schools found a lack of digital skills by both teachers and students. To this issue, we need to add another problem: the insufficiency of adequate online platforms and electronic materials to continue with the monitoring of virtual classes from home.
As an urgent response of this new demand in educational system, the European Commission publishes in August 25th 2020 the “Extraordinary Erasmus+ calls to support digital education readiness and creative skills”
Creative Skills and Digital Education
These two new calls are an extension of the Erasmus+ call 2020 published last year. were launched to respond to the educational challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of them provide €100 million to support digital education and creative skills related to this field. The deadline to apply any of these two calls is October 29th of 2020.
As it is published in the Erasmus+ website of the European Commission, we quote a brief summary of the purpose of both Erasmus+ calls:
«The call for digital education readiness will support projects in school education, vocational education and training, and higher education. This call will aim to enhance online, distance and blended learning – including supporting teachers and trainers, as well as safeguarding the inclusive nature of digital learning opportunities.»
«The call for ‘partnerships for creativity’ will support projects in the fields of youth, school education and adult education. The call aims to develop skills and competences that encourage creativity and boost quality, innovation and recognition of youth work.»