Abstract:

As addressed in the EU Recommended Policy Actions in Support of Dual Careers in High-Performance Sport, athletes involved in professional sports activities often face challenges to combine their sporting ambitions with education. Very demanding, intensive training sessions and competitions at home or abroad can be hardly combined with a sufficient involvement in academic activities, not only in terms of results but especially in levels of motivation, commitment, resilience, and responsibility from the athlete. A possible solution could be the support provided by e-learning services, which most of the Universities have in operation today. Unfortunately, the standard e-learning services are forged for “regular” students, not for people never attending courses, never participating to the social life of the University, never reading push or pull information academic life coming from the different sources, never having a contact with respective coursemates. This paper presents E.DU.CA (Education for DUal Carriers), a project from the University of Trento whose aim is to customize an already existing Virtual Community System to the needs of this category of students, to support and stimulate their academic carriers through a set of innovative services that will try to solve the above problems. The project, on this basis, wants to design and deliver these services for a broader category of users, i.e., working students, that present very similar (if not identical) problems and whose support from Universities is not so high as it should be.

Keywords:

e-learning, sport, dual carrier.