CASE STUDY

EduCoRe

by Diana Wieden-Bischof

This document is part of the overall European project LINKS-UP - Learning 2.0 for an Inclusive Knowledge Society – Understanding the Picture. Further case studies and project results can be downloaded from the project website http://www.linksup.eu.

Copyright

This work has been licensed under a Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivshttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author(s), and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

A lot of patients with physical deficiencies after an accident or illness suffer after this traumatically experience from isolation and exclusion from a normal life as well as ac-cess to learning during their long stay at medical rehabilitation centres. The aim of re-habilitation is to improve and recover the patient’s lost skills (physical, mental, job-re-lated and social) again at the highest possible level, so that they are able to take part on the life of the society as broad as possible. Rehabilitation is a huge field within health and it is important to understand and identify the patient’s rehabilitation learning needs. Therefore it is necessary to develop recovery-oriented services for rehabilitation patients with a restriction in their mobility which can be supported by e-learning ap-proaches. E-learning and blended learning can help here to open a window to the out-side world and eases the reintegration into normal life for patients. Therefore e-learning has a great potential in this specific educational context.

Case profile – EduCoRe in a nutshell

EduCoReEducational Counselling during Rehabilitation

Website http://www.rehab-counselling.eu

Status Active/running 12/2008 – 11/2010

Interviewed person

Elisabeth Frankus

die Berater (http://www.dieberater.com/)

e-mail: e.frankus@dieberater.com

Funded and promoted by… European Commission, Lifelong Learning Programme - Grundvig

Location of the Learning Activities hospital-home-rehab centre

Target group(s)

Addresses people who suffer from physical deficiencies after an accident or illness that threaten their employability and participa-tion in society. The main target groups which get trained to imple-ment the EduCoRe project are:

Trainers, programme developers and managers of adult education institutions, staff in career and educational counselling agencies, rehabilitation centres and the bodies which finance and maintain them, authorities, social security and insurance organisations, and other actors in the health sector as well as researchers on educa-tion, counselling and e-learning.

Educational Sector(s) Adult education

Category of the Learning Activities e-learning and blended learning, informal learning and non-formal

Web 2.0 technologies used... Weblogs, community platform, online courses, wiki

Short description and key characteristics

“EduCoRe (http://www.rehab-counselling.eu) builds on the experience gathered in the Grundtvig project eHospital (http://www.ehospital-project.net). This project investig-

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ated the potential of hospitals as places of informal learning and of information and communication technologies for patient education. Seven pilot e-learning courses for di-verse target groups were developed and tested in six countries.

During these courses a target group with specific educational needs was detected: Pa-tients who suffer from physical deficiencies after an accident or illness that threaten their employability and participation in society. As soon as they have left the hospital these patients spend several weeks or months in medical rehabilitation centres to re-ceive long-term treatment which aims at removing or at least minimising their physical impairments and thus allowing them to re-enter the labour market and normal life (EduCoRe, 2010).”

The main learning outcomes of the EduCoRe-project for the patients of rehabilitation centres in the context of personal counselling and training is to support them to make reflected career decisions, to identify the types of further education they need in this specific life situation, to improve their employability and participation in society and to develop necessary social and personal competencies to put their professional and edu-cational decisions into practice.

Key characteristics

EduCoRe (12/2008 – 11/2010) has been funded with support from the European Com-mission in the Lifelong Learning Programme Grundtvig. The approved budget is € 383,898 and thereof an amount of € 287,923 was granted. The coordinator of this pro-ject is “Die Berater” Unternehmensberatungsgesellschaft GmbH in Vienna, Austria which is responsible for the development of materials and the face-to-face interviews. There are five other partners working on this project namely Social-og Sundhedsskolen Aarhus in Denmark, Training 2000 in Italy, BUPNET GmbH – Bildung und Projektnet-zwerk GmbH in Germany, Donau-Universität Krems in Austria and Glotta Nova in Slove-nia.

EduCoRe addresses patients who spend several weeks or months in a medical rehabilita-tion centre. During this period they can use the offers of the project. From each partner country 15 patients are involved in the pilot phase. Altogether the project has five direct target groups which include trainers, programme developers and managers of adult education institutions, staff in career and educational counselling agencies, rehabilita-tion centres and the bodies which finance and maintain them, authorities, social secur-ity and insurance organisations, and other actors in the health sector as well as re-searchers on education, counselling and e-learning. This direct target group got informa-tion on how to support the rehab patients and how to implement the e-counselling and e-learning course.

Dimension of learning and inclusion

In the course of the EduCoRe project a tailor-made educational and computer-assisted career counselling process for rehab patients was developed and tested. It is supported by e-learning and e-counselling elements. Thus, rehab patients are able to reintegrate more easily into the labour market and to actively participate in society after the period of rehabilitation.

“The project’s counselling and training approach is a blended one: Elements of e-coun-selling and e-learning are integral parts of the service, as information and communica-

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tion technologies have a high potential for people who are restricted in their mobility or who change their location several times in the process of a medical rehabilitation (e.g. hospital-home-rehabilitation centre-home).” (EduCoRe, 2010)

Innovative elements and key success factors

To get an overall picture of the specific educational, emotional and social demands pa-tients as well as rehab staffs have, a needs analysis in rehabilitation centres in Austria, Germany, Italy, Denmark and Slovenia was carried out. On the basis of the needs analys-is and with active participation of the target groups the counselling concept and the training materials have been developed. To get additional know-how and to offer an ideal support for the patients in the future, EduCoRe provides training courses for the staff members of the direct target groups e.g. rehabilitation centres which should realise the concept with the patients in their daily work. Only the staff members really know if a patient is ready to start with the courses or if he/she needs more time to rehabilitate or to handle the new situation. Due to the short project period of 24 months, external trainers offer the courses for the patients and test the materials with them in the pilot phase. In the process they can better decide if the materials are to complex, the activit-ies to difficult or if the patients have problems with the e-learning platform in general.

The project website can be seen as an information portal which provides on one side details to the project itself, interesting links as well as information on learning during re-habilitation in general. On the other side the open-source platform offers an interactive area which contains tools for e-counselling and e-learning where patients can learn in-dependently and also with support from peers and a tutor. For the courses a Moodle platform is used. Patients can login at http://educore.q21.de/. Presently from each part-ner country 15 patients were selected and they can login with their user name and pass-word.

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Figure 1: EduCoRe e-learning platformSource: http://www.rehab-counselling.eu

The platform for the learning patients was set up and filled with e-learning materials. Patients of rehabilitation centres are able to have access to all course related documents and training materials, communicate and work with other patients and to learn and practice new ICT related knowledge. Furthermore during the EduCoRe project users get support and help from experienced trainers which encourage the patients to identify education and training courses to extend for example their computer skills and commu-nication competencies and learn how to deal with conflict situations, how to cope with strong emotions as well as get to know their personal strengths and weaknesses and be-haviour in stress situations.

The e-learning platform was adapted to the needs of the project and its target groups and offers besides the five courses 1.) Self-Evaluation, 2.) Personal Planning, 3.) Devel-opment of Interpersonal Skills, 4.) Application Strategies and 5.) Process Evaluation also a (help) forum for discussions. In each course the participant has to fulfil and run through different activities (e.g. tasks, questionnaires, cloze texts, exercises, lessons, tests). In some of the courses a wiki is used to create collaborative content, to support the patients involved in a common task to achieve their goals and for personal note tak-ing. The course “Process Evaluation” offers each user the possibility to open a weblog. Weblogs or blogs are a form of online journals and are used in this special case as a learning diary in which the patients can record their awareness and experiences from the learning processes as well as to express themselves.

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Figure 2: Overview of course 1.) Self-EvaluationSource: http://educore.q21.de

In the course of the EduCoRe-project altogether a kit for rehab counselling and training was developed which consists of counselling guidelines, the training curriculum, the ma-terials for face-to-face training, the learning objects for the e-learning part and the train-er’s manual.

The experiences and evaluation results from the pilots that will be gained in the six part-ner countries during the EduCoRe-project will be documented and summarized in a good practice brochure in five languages (English, German, Italian, Danish and Sloveni-an) for educators who wish to work in this field. The brochure describes achievements as well as pitfalls, and points out how counselling and learning activities may have an impact on the rehabilitation process of patients.

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Problems encountered and lessons learned

During the eHospital-project each partner has developed or chosen a different course programme (e.g. language course, ECDL-course (European Computer Driving Licence)) for their target group. The problem in this case was that it was not possible to compare the different materials and courses. Therefore it was clear for the EduCoRe-project that the partners develop together only one kid of training materials for professional orienta-tion and translate them in the different languages. However it was not as easy as it seems. The partners suddenly found out that the developed materials were not appro-priate for the target group of the patients with physical deficiencies which need e.g. less time-consuming materials because of the lack of concentration. So they had to change their concept and had to develop new materials as well as adapt the existing materials.

Unfortunately the patients in the pilot phase don’t use the platform as much as they should and the project partners have to wait until the patients have completed the questionnaire and the responsible partner has evaluated the reasons.

At the moment except of the wiki and weblog functionality no additional Web 2.0 tools are used. Depending on the evaluation report and the interviews made with the pa-tients in the eHospital-project, further Web 2.0 tools are implemented if there is a spe-cial need or desire from the target group of the EduCoRe-project.

Furthermore another problem in some countries especially in the rehabilitation centres is the existing scepticism and the lack of acceptance of the project because for the staff members it is additional work at the beginning. It is necessary to convince the staff members that the project brings an additional value for the patients.

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Collaborating institutions in LINKS-UP

Institute for Innovation in Learning, Friedrich-Alex-ander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germanywww.fim.uni-erlangen.de

Arcola Research LLP, London, United Kingdomwww.arcola-research.co.uk

eSociety Institute, The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Hague, The Netherlandswww.esocietyinstituut.nl

Servizi Didattici e Scientifici per l’Università di Firen-ze, Prato, Italywww.pin.unifi.it

Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Salzburg, Austriawww.salzburgresearch.at

European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN), Milton Keynes, United Kingdomwww.eden-online.org

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