The ‘SPOSH’ (Erasmus+) Project

The purposes of the project have been defined directly as part of two sectoral priorities of the ‘Erasmus+’ program:

• Development of high quality education and vocational training; and
• Implementation of tools conforming with the EU standards to enable delivery of the training.

The part of the project covering the first of the two priorities of the ‘Erasmus+’ program consist of development of high quality training materials and methods and its results will be based on collaboration with business organizations following the OSH/WHS standards. So, the materials will provide right away practical knowledge on actual implementation of specific OSH/WHS solutions in work environments.  Such solutions are supposed to meet the increasing demand of industries concerned with automation for better OSH/WHS standards in the SME segment.

Regarding the other priority of the ‘Erasmus+’ program, concerning implementation of adequate OSH/WHS in SMEs’ work environments, partners to the program will use diversified tools. One of the tools is the ‘European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System’ (ECVET). The tool makes it possible to give much extra appeal to the hitherto used training materials, facilitate measurement of actual results and streamline collaboration with interested companies.

The consortium will also take account of recommendations for ‘European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training’ (EQAVET) to ensure high level of implementation and testing, and application of optimal indicators of general evaluation of fulfilment of assumptions of the project, during development of relevant training tools. Partners of the consortium will also use the EUROPASS to standardize documents designed to acknowledge levels and types of existing or newly acquired professional skills.

The project will be focused mainly on training for industries using advanced manufacturing systems, particularly those equipped with technologies from the domain of industrial automatics and robotics. It is a very important sector of entrepreneurship in the context of the project for re-industrialization of Europe.     

The consortium will use some of the materials and results worked out as part of the project for ‘Advanced Vocational European Safety Training for SMEs with Automated Systems’ (ASMAS), the target group of which were people working in SMEs, mainly engineers and technicians but also personnel responsible for corporate management and experts in the domain of knowledge related to the subject of OSH/WHS.  

Description of results:

Well working and accessible portal for the project, constituting an IT platform used to support the process of learning focused on a target group specified in the assumptions, i.e., employees of the SME sector including managerial staff and students of vocational schools and academies. The consortium will provide easy access to training contents by introducing an efficient method for navigating in the index of subjects of the materials, integrated evaluation tools, multilinguality and generally high functionality of the system. The resulting e-learning platform will operate on the principle of an interactive source of knowledge enabling based collaboration between trainers, trainees and OSH/WHS experts. Provision of a high level of innovativeness of this e-learning system will make it possible to share training materials in a controlled way, owing to which it will be possible to monitor progress in learning knowledge at all times and evaluate results. Communication between participants will be based on text and voice messengers, access to the group’s forum, organization of virtual classes and visual communication. 

‘Erasmus+’, Action 2:

Projects implemented as part of the ‘Erasmus+’ program, Action 2, are assumed to continue the agenda for the ‘Lifetime Learning’ program, i.e., implement innovative educational solutions for improvement of professional skills.  The program promotes innovative approaches to education and vocational improvement to ensure that education systems respond to the fullest to the current requirements of the labour market.

Implementation timeframe: 01/09/2015 – 31/08/2018

Project budget: EUR 374,064.00 (incl. EUR 102,263.00 for PIAP); project implemented as part of the ‘ERASMUS+’ Program, Action 2: Strategic partnerships under contract 2015-1-PL01-KA202-016625 concluded between PIAP and the European Commission on September 21, 2015.

Project type: International research project

Coordinator: Industrial Institute for Automation and Measurements (PIAP), Poland

Partners:

• TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY KOSICE (TUKE), Slovakia
• European Centre for Quality OOD, Bulgaria
• IEBA Centro de Iniciativas Empresariais e Sociais, Portugal
• Cluster AT+R, Slovakia

Contracts concluded with partners:

• 2015-1-PL01-KA202-016625 – TUKE
• 2015-1-PL01-KA202-016625 – ECO
• 2015-1-PL01-KA202-016625 – IEBA, Oct. 2015
• 2015-1-PL01-KA202-016625 – Cluster AT+R

This project has received funding from the European Union’s ERASMUS+ programme (the EU Programme in the fields of education, training, youth and sport for the period 2014-2020)