Abstract:

Vocational education and training (VET) has become significantly more important as a learning method which aims to generate valuable outcomes for a potentially employable workforce in a more demanding society by developing students’ work-oriented skills. As a result, many programmes are implementing this form of learning and it is straightforward to explore its opportunities and challenges. In this study we analyse this type of education in the European context. Specifically, we report the results of a partnership experience involving Italy, Spain, Greece, Romania, Cyprus and the Netherlands under the framework of an Erasmus+ Project.

The main objective of this project is to raise students’ awareness about the importance of self-employment in view of the upcoming technological challenges and a more knowledge-intensive environment regarding employment. In particular, the project aims to promote a specific type of self-employment: social entrepreneurship. The motive behind this idea is to make a positive impact on society. To do so, we launched the EnSoEd project (Innovative Teacher Training in Social Entrepreneurship), whose aim was to develop a complete method for both trainers and teachers, where social entrepreneurship could be taught in a simple manner.

To achieve all these goals, we created different tools: a social entrepreneurship training package, a virtual e-learning platform to make the experience easier for the teachers, and a gamified learning system in which we used badges to ensure that teachers were ready and trained to teach the subject of social entrepreneurship to their VET students. The final step was to use badges with the students to certify that they had developed the necessary strategic skills regarding social entrepreneurship, such as creativity, social responsibility, teamwork, the ability to identify target groups or other beneficiaries, cooperation, etc. In this way, we obtained a complex and complete method for a constantly changing environment.

Keywords:

Social entrepreneurship, creativity, gamification, engagement, VET.