"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."