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Academia+
offering interactive webinars in place of face-to-face
study weeks
The project relevant days for their work as we know that not
everyone would be able to attend all four webinars.
Academia+ is a three-year Erasmus+ KA2 project
that helps careers guidance practitioners share We also knew that the delivery method needed to
knowledge and facilitate the transition between change as sitting alone at a screen is a very
learning and work, and different jobs, by dealing different experience to being in a room full of like-
with emerging issues in the labour market – minded professionals. To ensure engagement we:
migration, digitisation and an ageing workforce. structured each day to include speakers from
The primary output of this project is the different countries with different professions to keep
development of three rounds of study visits interest high; each presentation and webinar
focused on each of these main topics, where included interactive elements such as thought
careers practitioners can learn from another provoking questions and polls; and each day also
country and share their knowledge. However, the included elements of group work where participants
coronavirus meant that travel was not possible so would use breakout rooms to discuss a topic, post
we converted the first round of training into a series their answers on a group Padlet page, before
of webinars, and due to its success we have designating a speaker to present to the group.
decided that the next two rounds of training will Although this structure was different to the original
also be delivered via webinar. plan, the essence of group work and transnational
learning was maintained and participant feedback
Online training sessions showed that the webinars were engaging,
informative and enjoyable. All materials were also
uploaded onto Moodle so that participants could
We converted 4 week-long study visits for
careers guidance practitioners around migration revisit content and those who were unable to attend
could still benefit from each webinar.
into 4 webinars spread across 2 weeks due to the
travel restrictions put in place with coronavirus.
The success of these webinars has led to us
These were very successful and also enabled us
to increase the transnational learning element of deciding to run the training around careers
guidance and digitisation, and the impacts of an
the training as speakers came from 5 different
countries, and 47 participants attended from 20 ageing population online in March and May 2021.
countries, offering more variety than the original To find out more, please visit
plan of 4 participating countries.
https://academiaplus.eu/
When discussing the transition to webinars, we
recognized early on that the agenda needed to fit
around people working from their computers, in Emma Campbell
different time zones, who may also need to fit their Euroguidance UK
training around current work. As a result, we
staggered the training across two weeks, adjusted
the days so that they were shorter and had regular
breaks, and assigned specific topics to each day
so that participants could sign up to the most
