Abstract:

The Council of the European Union adopted a Recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning. Eight key competences essential to citizens for personal fulfilment, a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, employability, active citizenship and social inclusion are identified. (European Union, 2018). This paper will take a look at hands-on business development programme STARTER which helps to develop most of the listed competences. The program is targeted mostly to HEI students but is also open to pupils from vocational schools and gymnasiums.

Semester-long extra-curriculum programme STARTER financed by ESF programme “Systematic development of entrepreneurship and career education at all levels of education” consists of workshops that guide teams from ideation to business model with the aim to find solutions to the needs that have arisen in society. Teams receive individual mentoring from start-up founders or entrepreneurs and regular performance evaluations from instructors. Individuals and teams introduce their ideas at Idea Hackathon. Under the guidance of the moderator, students across various disciplines form teams and got instructions for initial validation. The programme ends with business and project ideas competition.

The case study takes a deeper look at the student start-up called SORTER which is a great example for students’ digital civic engagement activity which develops not only entrepreneurship and citizenship competences but also many other competencies.

In the Agenda for Sustainable Development is stated that sustainable urban development and management are crucial to the quality of life of our people (United Nations, 2015). Therefore, reduction and recycling of waste will be very important. The European Union is also planning to set challenging targets to recycle 75% of packaging waste by 2030 (European Union, 2019) but the problem is that even many environmentally friendly people have confessed that they are not sure how to sort their waste correctly. There are so many multi-packages and conflicted information about it. Here the SORTER's solution, a simple and easy to use mobile application could be a great help.

6 qualitative interviews will be analysed to find out why the programme was launched, what motivates the students to participate in civic engagement projects, how the digital tools can be used for teaching and learning as well as what are the benefits for students, university and community. These results will support achieving strategical goals set in Estonian Education Development Plan 2021-2035 to implement more practical learning (eg problem-based and project-based learning) to make learning tasks more meaningful and to develop the ability to solve the challenges of personal life, teaching, the local community or society in a creative, collaborative and innovative way (Ministry of Education, 2020).

References:
[1] United Nations, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda
[2] European Union, Review of Waste Policy and Legislation, https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/target_review.htm
[3] European Union, Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/297a33c8-a1f3-11e9-9d01-01aa75ed71a1/language-en
[4] Ministry of Education, Eesti haridusvaldkonna arengukava 2035 https://www.hm.ee/sites/default/files/haridusvaldkonna_arengukava_2035_27okt.pdf

Keywords:

Extracurricular activities, Skills development, SDG, Problem-based learning.