Upon the development of the first edition of the course “Digital Literacy for Labour Market” which was based on an Erasmus+ KA2 Project (T21 http://t21.ese.ipsantarem.pt), in which was developed a set of activities regarding digital competences, inclusion and employability that were identified as good practices, replicable in other countries and continents. The coordination team of the course quickly realised that it was paramount to provide training based on the characteristics and realities of students with intellectual and developmental difficulties. Thus, it proceeded to the implementation of a training in Digital Literacy for the labour market, which resulted in two years of training make up a total of 120 ECTS. The first year was devoted to transversal contents in the field of digital literacy for the labour market, and the second year focused on the skills required for students to perform well in the job market. However, a major issue was raised, which was the importance of having a pre and post training sessions to support the educators that were involved in the course. This issue represents a major concern for either the educators (teachers, trainers and coaches) point of view as well as in the learning skills that are needed to obtain in order to properly address the special needs of these students.This partnership has started because the partners felt the same needs inside their organizations and with the population they worked with. Therefore, this project aims to address and enhance the skills of the mentors/educators (teachers, trainers and coaches) who work with Intellectual and Developmental Disability students in higher education contexts. These mentors require specific training on several skills (social, pedagogical, methodological, communicative, digital, entrepreneurial, etc) in order to properly support, train and capacitate students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDDs) and address their learning needs. This issue is still a present concern in many European countries, especially on those who have the departments or resources to implement this type of training programmes in their Higher Education Institutions but still lack the know how or the specialised human resources that can enable the implementation of these courses, specifically concerning the student’s follow up in their learning process. Thus, mentors (teachers, trainers and coaches) need to be well prepared and attain the enough skills and competences to cope with the learning process of students with IDDs, since these students require a more informal learning focused on communication, collaboration and adapted pedagogical practices. Thus, it is critical that the organisations take an active role in providing re-training programmes, in which individuals can take a proactive opportunity to gain and enhance skills and to have a better approach when teaching students with IDDs.Therefore, the focus of the proposed project is the implementation various educational contents, from methodologies and guidelines, educational kits, one Escape Room with immersive games, best practices handbooks and an LTT activity for staff. The LTT will address mainly social, pedagogical and methodological practices and how to engage with IDDs in a classroom context, as well as a focus on the specific competencies and learning contents that this target group desires and need to acquire in order to become more autonomous, social included and labour oriented. These sessions will have the support of tangible outcomes such as the training materials, case studies and best practices handbooks. As for deliverables after the training sessions, the focus will be on: a) a roadmap to labour market guidance and b) a job incubation that allow less effective trainees (which could unstable a work environment) to improve their autonomy through an adapted monitoring tailored to their labour competences and needs.We hope to have a large impact inside the partnership with the project, but more important in the community and the target group (mentors and educators) but also in the ultimate beneficiaries, the IDDs citizens, enhancing both the skills of educators and learners, promoting inclusion.

The social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities is gaining increased importance in the EU context. Several measures and supports had been given from different types of organizations as well as from local, national and European policies. Despite the European Disability Strategy (2010-2020), there is still lots of work to be done even considering the emergency and mediatism of this subject.In this context, the T21COMmunity Project aimed at promoting and facilitating the social inclusion and the employability of European Down Syndrome (DS) youth citizens through Tourism and e-skills. Initiatives and strategies in this area are still, mainly, being done by non-profit organizations and associations in the civil society with very few financial resources. Therefore, this project aims at making a positive difference in the area of DS youth support.The project has two main primary target groups, namely:1. Young people between 13 (preferably older than 17 years old) and 30 years old with DS that face psychological, social or physical challenges and that need alternative pathways to engage with education and new technological competences for employability.2. Teachers, stakeholders and relevant professionals involved in the delivery and development of creative and innovative educational responses for young people who do not engage in mainstream educational settings.Three specific objectives and related activities were addressed:The first one, translated into sharing good practices at various levels, was focused on the specific target group of disadvantaged and ‘at-risk’ young people, namely DS young citizens.Education systems that maximize social inclusion; developments in the use of technology to create active learning environments that support innovative pedagogies, collaboration and effective practice for disadvantaged learners; and increase the limited research in the area of non-formal learning (especially in e-skills) were impactful results.With the second objective it was meant to identify key components that constitute a successful and engaging educational experience for learners and instructional roles within an online and blended learning environment. The partnership challenge was to identify the unique set of design principles and component parts required to provide an effective solution for education of disadvantaged people. By the third objective, it was intended to explore areas for the application of key components in the development of innovative approaches. It was focused on the learning perspective of “how could we learn more about these thematic”, and as technology continues to evolve, the ability to merge these upcoming technologies with non-formal education also became increasingly relevant to explore viable solutions to address the needs of DS targets.In order to test the new educational materials with gamification tools, methodological and pedagogical guidelines with specific and innovative approaches to the DS target population, and to develop their skills on tourism and e-skills towards their inclusion and employability, learning and teaching activities were undertaken for a group of 6 DS participants per partner country, 18 in total (supported by 2 accompanying persons per partner country), having a huge impact in target population and stakeholders involved.The scientific, societal, technological, policy and economic impacts achieved at the local, regional, national and European scope consisted in the fulfillment of the various workshops and actions that promoted equity and inclusion among these target groups (young adults with DS). Thus, the inclusion of DS citizens in society and in the labor market through the implementation of several actions, initiatives and activities that this project provided were perceived as viable and highly important strategies to the social, digital and professional inclusion of these citizens, having in general a noticeable impact at all levels. In addition, this project provided several outcomes and results that, not only, contributed to the social and digital inclusion of DS citizens as well as allowed the development of specific activities, namely: digital educational contents; methodological and pedagogical guidelines; innovative web platforms and social networks; and also creative short stories eBooks among others. In terms of longer term benefits, this project allowed, due to is relation with stakeholders, volunteers and teachers, the launch of a unique and innovative training course in Higher Education for young people with intellectual disabilities, named Digital Literacy for Labor Market, with the participants of TV COMmunity project, being one of the most important impactful outcome.

According to Eurostat, in 2013 one in every three Portuguese has never used the Internet. Portugal is the fifth country with the highest percentage of people in this situation (33%), preceded by Romania (42%), Bulgaria (41%), Greece (36%) and Italy (35%). On the other hand Denmark and Sweden have the lowest, both with 4%. The average in the 28 EU member countries is 21%. This project addressed this problem by engaging synergies of 7 partners in 4 countries (Portugal, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany) whose good practices were shared and validated by the Science and Technology Foundation. This network worked both at local, regional, national and international levels in transversal and trans-sectorial areas, both in terms of the partners involved (academic and enterprise), and in terms of the focus group (VET; adult education with disadvantaged background; HEI with special focus on this group) literacy inclusion, re-qualification and employability. This project involved partners in a high collaborative team work that resulted in achievements to be proud. These went beyond the initial project proposal, especially boosted by the impact the project had in the stakeholders. This cohesive team even completed activities that were not eligible for funding and also promoted new activities that derived from the project development.Our team brought together their expertise and discussed actively all the phases of the project, starting by stating and collecting the knowledge available on the subject and also by developing a nowadays strong dissemination tool: a webpage, with the creation of a specific marketing image for the project (logo), RSS feed, and informational documents of the project; promotional videos to explain the project to the stakeholders and to the public. The continuous work of the team was fully accompanied by all members in 7 transnational meetings that took place in: Santarém (2015); Munich (2015); Rome (2016); Glasgow (2016); Rome (2017); Lisboa (2017); Lisboa (2017). The project also promoted 2 multiplier events to disseminate the work done to the society and to the stakeholders: the first was in Santarém (31st May 2016) and the second one in Lisbon (5th June 2017).The relation with the stakeholders have always been present with a strong relationship with, for instance, Rede Tic e Sociedade, which is devoted to promote the best practices for digital literacy inclusion in Portugal. The project built educational contents on the three digital e-skills levels (basic, intermediate, advanced) in multi-format (webpages, ebooks, MOOCs) and multilingual (English, Portuguese, German and Italian) forms.Although the training sessions were not funded, the team decided to prepare materials and to produce Pedagogical and Didactical Guidelines to provide to the stakeholders, in order be later used with the disadvantaged background citizens. Some training sessions with disadvantaged citizens (older people, refugees) took place with the partners from Scotland, Italy and Germany. A MOOC on employability was also created to help disadvantaged people to follow a direction in order to up skill their curriculum and to find a job.The activities and the work done was disseminated through the webpages, the multiplier events and the produced and presented papers in national and international fora.The recognition of the work developed in this project came through the National Science Foundation Agency that invited the project coordinator to participate in the Portugal INCODE 2030 initiative panel, on the axis “Inclusion”, in order to promote and present the project, at the event Ciência 2017, which is the annual meeting of the Portuguese science and technology community.Finally, we would like to enhance the longer-term benefits of this project. All the materials produced for this project were regionally adapted for each partner country into 4 different languages (English, portuguese, german and Italian) and are freely available to be used in the formation of the disadvantaged population in training sessions.The recent (September 2017) report of the group of the Working Group of Education from UNESCO on “Digital Skills for life and work” states that “Even the lives of people who do not have access to digital technology are increasingly dependent on it.”. So, their recommendations to the policy makers and to the stakeholders reinforce the urgent need of ensuring digital literacy for all, through national formation initiatives to all the population, with a particular focus on the “out-of-school children and those without basic digital skills” , “disadvantaged groups irrespective of gender, age, race or disability”, “illiterate or unemployed adults”. As far as we can understand our project is completely aligned with the recommendations from UNESCO, providing digital literacy contents and strategies to training sessions that allow for a widespread formation on e-skills.