“Digital Youth Work – Past, Present, Future”

Young people in Europe spend an increasing amount of their time consuming digital media (video streams, messaging, blogs or social media). However, there is an obvious lack of competences of young people to use many online platforms for learning instead only for leisure and entertainment. These tools can provide a place for young people to learn, to share their experiences, to exchange their views, to have fun with their friends and to actively participate in society.

This project aims at raising awareness on digital competences of youth work specialists and equipping them with the necessary know-how in order to create target group appropriate distance learning models.
With specific objectives:
• To create mechanisms for the development of youth work specialists’ digital competencies;
• To gain new competences regarding non-formal education activity development and implementation from different online and offline perspectives;
• To facilitate learning and understanding on how to use online learning platforms such as Moodle, Coursera, Zoom, EdX, etc., for development and implementation of newly created and current non-formal education activities;
• To develop and test webinars on various topics and issues important to youth in the participating organizations’ communities;
• To understand the value and potentials of online learning in making their current and future activities more attractive and accessible to local youth;
• To provide networking opportunities and facilitate exchange among participating organizations and their members in order to create sustainable linkages in the field of digital competences;
• To create a compendium on development and implementation of online learning activities. 

Distance education around the world has already demonstrated that access can be increased and costs can be cut. However many countries online and distance learning are still considered a second chance option. Therefore, youth organizations will have to put in place exact quality assurance mechanisms in order to create content adjusted to online learning platforms and identified needs and learning objectives of their attendees. The impact for learners will be that they will have many morе choices for determining which courses to follow and with which organization. The organizations which provide educational activities will practice both formal and non-formal approach. This will result with higher level of cross-institutional cooperation regarding development and implementation of various educational programmes in coming days.