"The AROMA project was motivated by the EU’s Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan and in particular by the need to amplify Europe's entrepreneurial potential. A survey, which was one of the project outcomes and served as a base for the design and the development of the project materials, confirmed several motivating expectations. Though the augmented reality (AR) technology gradually finds its way into business, education and common life, it can be still considered like relatively unknown and there is a gap and need to promote the awareness about the technology. Generally, many experts expects the technology can help to rise the efficiency, could accelerate training, make learning and training more dynamic and could also enable to solve problems faster. Moreover, digital skills and ICT competencies are generally considered as key and crucial to develop in today's education and training. This situation supports the need of providing training in augmented reality to relevant audience using a practical and hands-on approach. The overall objective of the AROMA project was to develop an on-line course ""Augmented reality and Business Skills"" and supporting materials (the course curriculum, supporting train the trainer course, case-studies, live-demos) that altogether form a digital training toolbox through which the project’s target audience, especially those entering the topics, can be provided with training in augmented reality technology, can learn about its principles, possibilities and get some practical experience with it. A special feature of the course is a connection with training in business skills and competencies, for which the technology may serve as an important tool. The aim was to motivate a novel breed of entrepreneurs that should able to exploit the technology in different business scenarios and hopefully find the way how to use it for their activities. All the materials as a comprehensive digital toolbox should facilitate vocational education (VET) trainers in their creation of their modular training, compiling other relevant case-studies etc. Designed innovative educational curriculum integrating training in augmented reality and multilingual training in business skills can be flexibly applicable in various contexts. An integral part of the toolbox is the created AROMA e-Learning Management System maintained also after the project completion.The project brought together 8 European partners with a specific mix of profiles, backgrounds and expertise relevant for various aspects of the project including vocational education provision, augmented reality technology expertise, pan -European entrepreneurship association, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) supporting organisation, higher education and adult learning as well as the world of work.The pedagogic methodology of the AROMA project is based on the ‘train the trainers’ and modular approach and all the outcomes are freely available from the project website sites.google.com/view/ka2project/. The project targeted primarily on vocational education trainers with the expectation that though this community the AROMA results might reach out to the end target audience all those interested augmented reality technology in context with setting-up business or specialized training and skills development e.g. existing entrepreneurs, start-up entrepreneurs, social enterprises, stakeholders, business incubators and centres, and secondary to any adult learners, and higher education students."

"CONTEXT/BACKGROUND OF PROJECT:According to the EU’s Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition (2016), around 45% of EU citizens are digitally illiterate. Thus, giving EU adults a chance of catching up with such skills is indeed very relevant. EC studies forecast that a large majority of jobs will require 21st Century skills including digital competence, communication, problem-solving, team working and emotional intelligence. A lack of relevant digital skills disadvantages people in every part of society and inhibits the full potential of our economies and culture. As digitisation penetrates more aspects of our daily life from tasks at home, to tasks at work, the demand on EU adults to be skilled in digital literacy is daily increasing. At the same time, participation in lifelong learning by adults remains low. This situation implied that such EU adults need to be attracted to engage in lifelong learning to help them acquire digital skills to catch up with the opportunities and needs of a digital economy and society. One means which can offer a host of ways to attract and engage adult learners in a novel way, is that of ‘Virtual & Augmented Reality (VAR)’ technology. However, for this to be achieved, EU Adult trainers required training on the concepts and application of VAR technology. OBJECTIVES OF YOUR PROJECT:The aim of this VITA (Virtual & Augmented Reality Trainers Toolbox to Enable Adults Catch Up With Life Skills) project was precisely concerned with developing a novel digital toolbox by which Adult Trainers can attract, reach out and assist adult learners to catch up with 21st Century Digital life skills. To achieve this aim, the VITA project had set these objectives: * OB1: To understand the training needs of adult learners with respect to 21st Century Digital life skills; * OB2: To develop a Curriculum targeted at engaging adults to learn 21st Century Digital life skills ; * OB3: To develop a set of case-studies exploiting VAR technology to both attract and engage adults to catch up and learn 21st Century digital life skills; * 0B4: To develop an innovative VAR-based toolbox which provides EU Adult Trainers with a set of resources including case-studies, demos and e-learning content to allow them to both attract and engage adult learners in learning 21st Century basic digital skills; * OB5: To evaluate the VAR-based toolbox with a set of Adult Trainers; * OB6: To disseminate & exploit the results of the VITA project and in particular ensure that the VAR training toolbox is openly available to at least 1000 other Adult Trainers across Europe. NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTSTo address these goals, the VITA project consortium consisted of five European entities ranging from Adult Training Institutions, public HEI, private VAR technology service providers and social enterpirse to collectively develop the VITA training toolbox targeted at engaging adult learners to acquire 21st Century skills and in particular digital literacy. These partners were purposely chosen to ensure a good balance between experts in Adult Education pedagogy (andragogy), second chance training/ learning and curriculum development, digital literacy, Virtual & Augmented Reality technology as well as stakeholders from the social and business sector. RESULTS AND IMPACTS ACHIEVED :Using the ""project cycle management” 4-phase approach, the main reusable result arising from the VITA projects were the VITA Trainers Toolbox (www.mecb.com.mt/tool/vita), consisting of an original Curriculum, e-Learning content on 21st Century basic digital skills, Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality based case-studies and a free repository. To raise awareness of the project goals and results, the VITA partners disseminated information through a number of means including a web page (www.mecb.com.mt/vita), Facebook Page (www.facebook.com/KA2VITA/) and YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/channel/UC7FkZsO6y1t7wER9VXbqgHA). In addition, each partner organized a multiplier event in their country while the consortium collectively organized a final conference to reach out to both adult trainers and learners in Romania during the period of the Romania Presidency. Worth also mentioning is that one partner meeting took place in Brussels with a back-to-back public event for which a number of European adult education stakeholders were invited. As a result of this overall dissemination approach, it is expected that the reusable VITA outputs will be exploited by organisations both within and outside the consortium for training both their adult staff and learners. In the long-term as a result of the now freely available VITA Trainers Toolbox, many more EU adult learners will be in a better chance of catching up with 21st Century digital life skills."

"Partner organizations from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Romania and Turkey have realized in their daily work with teachers and students at secondary schools that the need for improving existing approaches to teaching key competences is evident. In addition, the preliminary analysis showed that in time of financial crisis, schools are not willing to spend funds on ""one-time"" extracurricular trainings in soft competences, but are in favor of more school based and long-term approach. Nowadays European school policy is focused on teachers as the most important in-school factor affecting students` outcomes and it is strongly aimed at improving the quality of teaching by improving teacher education both in initial and continuing professional development.Stepping on their previous experience in developing soft competences training methodologies for young people at school, the partners decided to propose a new teaching methodology for secondary schools, which can be summarized as teaching transversal competences at school to improve overall students' acquisition of learning content. The methodology will be applicable to teaching process in all general school subjects and will be available in 5 languages, including English. The expected impact:• for the pupils - more attractive classes, more understandable content, better performance, greater motivation to learn, smooth transition to the labour market or further education;• for the teachers - better qualification, better motivation and confidence in facing rising learning needs of their students;• for the secondary school in general - more efficient learning process, optimization of extracurricular training costs, more effective communication and cooperation between parties. The teaching methodology offered by the current project proposal is innovative both in terms of content and format. The methodology is based on a study of training needs among employers, students and teachers and steps onto six themes: Effective communication, Cooperation, Problem solving, Entrepreneurship, Finding and managing of information and Lifelong learning. Project activities have two-way orientation in accordance with the recommendations of the ET2020 Working group on School policy :- inside - to improve collaboration between the main actors in the educational process - students, teachers, principals;- outside - to active inclusion of ""external"" factors in the educational process - parents, stakeholders, policy makers.This is a favorable precondition for achieving both the objectives and added value to the expected results."