Novel Educational Model Enabling Social Innovation Skills development

Project Information

NEMESIS

Grant agreement ID: 770348

DOI

10.3030/770348

Project closed

EC signature date 27 September 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 31 July 2021

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Europe In A Changing World - Inclusive, Innovative And Reflective Societies

Total cost

€ 2 237 875,00

EU contribution

€ 2 132 912,50

Coordinated by

FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER-UNIVERSITAET ERLANGEN-NUERNBERG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NEMESIS (Novel Educational Model Enabling Social Innovation Skills development)

Reporting period: 2019-12-01 to 2021-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Europe is facing various sustainability challenges from high youth unemployment to the economic crisis and migration, underlying the urgent need for the creation of new solutions and the adoption of new paradigms for change that will promote sustainable growth and improve societal conditions such as inequality, poverty and social exclusion. European education systems continue to fall short in providing the skills we will need to be productive contributors in the future.
NEMESIS aims to create a new educational model that will harvest students’ know-how and build on their inherent skills as a means to improve their capabilities and drive social change. It enables students to become creative social thinkers, develop entrepreneurial mindsets and become social change makers in a world where inequality, poverty and social exclusion are still quite evident.
The project’s vision is to serve as a catalyst for innovative, engaging and interdisciplinary learning. NEMESIS presents a new learning approach by combining innovative learning models, open technologies and participatory relations and processes.
NEMESIS has outlined a set of specific objectives to achieve its outcomes. These objectives are:
• To design a unique framework for teaching social innovation skills to young people of primary and secondary education level
• To improve teaching and learning practices in skills-based education
• To develop a European wide community of SIPs
• To develop an online platform that will grant open access to social innovation, complemented by other digital tools
• To ensure equal opportunities to SI education for all including those from disadvantaged backgrounds
• To break down barriers to organisational change and foster a new culture of open collective learning targeted to SI education
• To evaluate the added value of the NEMESIS model and encourage its wide uptake

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Social Innovation Education (SIE) and innovation skills are needed for a just, sustainable, prosperous and inclusive European future. The NEMESIS project (http://nemesis-edu.eu/) devoted the last four years to research, testing and experimentation activities in close collaboration with schools, teachers, students, parents, Social Innovation Practitioners (SIPs), education experts and policymakers. As a result, rich data and insightful findings were produced that now open new pathways for promoting and mainstreaming SIE.

To support teachers and students NEMESIS has created a Social Innovation Learning Framework (SILF) that includes 13 competencies necessary for social innovation, alongside practical tools, to improve the teaching and learning of core change-making skills and competencies. The NEMESIS SILF has been evaluated with great success during the two pilot periods, with more than 40 schools working on social innovation projects and more than 5000 students directly affected and involved and more than 10000 being aware of the project and its objectives. The results show that the NEMESIS SILF is inclusive and beneficial for all students including those socially, economically, mentally, healthy and emotionally disadvantaged. More than 150 teachers have been trained by NEMESIS and at least another 150 have attended NEMESIS information events. More than 16.000 headteachers and deputy headteachers across Europe were made aware of the NEMESIS.

Furthermore, the project developed a number of digital assets to support the introduction of SIE into schools. The digital assets include a Social Innovation Open Learning Platform (https://nemesis.odl.org/) to offer a protected workspace for collaboration on projects and content generation, a NEMESIS MOOC (https://nemesismooc.odl.org/) to support teachers continuous development and training and a Serious Game (https://changemakergame.ili.eu/) to assist with the introduction of SI concepts to a younger audience in a more playful manner. All digital assets will remain open and available to interested stakeholders for at least 5 years.

NEMESIS had a very successful dissemination strategy through its online and social media presence with thousands of followers. The project’s website had 11,000 users who visited the website with 16,000 sessions in total and 36,772 pages viewed. The NEMESIS Facebook page built an online community around the project with 2,000 like and 2,045 followers and a total of 468 publications. The NEMESIS Twitter account has 1,584 followers with a total of 1,159 publications.

Finally, the project produced a large number of good practices, training tools and resources as well as information and evidence about the impact of SIE. To make SIE viable and sustainable in the long term it is essential for good practices and resources to be scaled up. The project has already placed solid foundations as far as its exploitation and sustainability concerns. It is already expanding the NEMESIS approach into different educational areas, grades and geographical areas through additional funding. The new projects will increase dramatically the impact of the project and will validate the approach of the NEMESIS SIE event further.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Collective learning, co-design and co-creation, open learning platform, are only some of the elements that distinguish NEMESIS and help us advance beyond the state of the art. Based on a state of the art analysis that has been performed, here is how NEMESIS differs from existing relevant educational offerings:
• The first element is the emphasis of NEMESIS to open education for all. NEMESIS developed an SI Open learning platform, using open-source software, to offer open access to both training and educational resources to teachers and enable them to apply the NEMESIS model at their schools. At the same, the platform facilitates the creation of a community of practice (CoP) for teachers in social innovation education, something that is missing at a European level.
• NEMESIS is flexible and will be developed in a way to be easily adopted by all, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• NEMESIS aims to engage students in a participatory process where students are co-creators of the knowledge through the organisation and implementation of co-creation labs.
• The NEMESIS educational model is built together with those already having the skills and mindsets related to social innovation, the so-called Social Innovation Practitioner (SIPs).
• NEMESIS introduces young people and educational stakeholders to key co-creation and collective intelligence principles through co-creation labs.
• Emphasis is also put on collective learning, collective intelligence. Students work in teams to design their projects and prepare their digital stories.
• NEMESIS creates a European Community of Social Innovation Practitioners committed to helping students learning journeys through mentoring and motivation.
• NEMESIS supports the development and availability of open educational resources (OER).
• The NEMESIS model focuses on the development of social Innovation skills in combination with digital literacy skills by engaging students in digital storytelling.
• NEMESIS created an SI Open learning platform that offers open access to training and educational resources, to the SIP community and to best practices.
• NEMESIS created an SIE MOOC to assist the training of teachers on SIE beyond the lifetime of the project
• NEMESIS created a Serious Game to support the introduction of social innovation concepts in a playful manner

NEMESIS Logo variation

NEMESIS Logo