Initiative for digital upskilling

BoostDigiCulture – Call for Participation

Enhancing digital capacities of adult cultural professionals

The Erasmus+ Project “BoostDigiCulture” intends to set the foundation for a sustainable and inclusive professional development framework of open educational resources and practices, designed to enhance the digital competencies of cultural professionals with low digital skills, especially those working in small and medium-sized cultural institutions in the partner countries and beyond.

The project aims to enhance the capacity of adult cultural professionals in implementing digital culture in their institutional agenda and promote awareness of the importance of digital readiness and training for adult cultural professionals for institutional resilience and sustainability.

Six partners are working together, led by the Stiftung Digitale Chancen (Digital Opportunities Foundation) (Germany), including Exeo Lab (Italy), ICARUS HRVATSKA (TMO member, Croatia) , INNOVATION HIVE (Greece), RightChallenge (Portugal) und Synthesis Center for Research and Education Limited (Cyprus).

Project Aims

BoostDigiCulture develops different products for small to mid-sized cultural institutions as well as cultural workers within the field. Among those are an e-learning platform that allows participation in peer-to-peer mentoring, as well as an upskilling programme that shall enable the participants to obtain the necessary skills to produce and curate digital content for their own institutions.

E-Learning Platform for Digital Culturally Relevant Sites

The development of a multifunctional online interdisciplinary learning platform that will act as a cultural affinity space. The intention of the BoostDigiCulture project is to provide concrete, co-creative and practice-based learning modules and support tools. To reach the above objectives, the BoostDigiCulture e-learning Platform will feature a digital infrastructure where adult cultural professionals and small and medium-sized cultural institutions can have free and user-friendly access in order to empower their digital cultural competencies upskilling and resilience.

Digital Proficiency Profile (PDP)

This project result refers to defining competence needs for the cultural sector, in accordance with the “DigComp at Work” Implementation Guide (2020). The DigComp can be used to develop a Professional Digital competence Profile (PDP) which will guide stakeholders to walk through all aspects of digital competence to identify and describe current and possible future digital knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for the cultural professional job.

Microlearning Training Programme

The BoostDigiCulture upskilling programme is designed to accommodate the needs of small and medium-sized cultural institutions, through enhancing adult cultural professionals’ digital capabilities with regard to digital content creation, curation and institutional digital strategy. The content of the programme will relate to the specific needs and challenges that adult cultural professionals face and which will be identified through the self-assessment tool (see below), following the guidelines on the DigComp at Work Implementation Guide (2020) and the design of the BoostDigiCulture Professional Digital competence Profile (see above).

Self-Assessment Tool

The project will develop a self-assessment tool, drawing on the principles of the DigComp at Work Implementation Guide (2020). The development and implementation of the tool follow the development of the BoostDigiCulture Professional Digital competence Profile (PDP) and precedes the development of the Microlearning Programme for the digital upskilling of adult cultural professionals. It will also be used as a form of evaluation, following the completion of the programme.

Call for Participation

Currently, the project consortium is looking for participants from the cultural sector who would like to take part in the pilot phase. Staff or board members or organizations working in the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) are welcome, as well as adult education staff and stakeholders active in the cultural or digital field.

Among other things, participants will have the opportunity to test the project’s e-learning platform and self-assessment tool on digital skills and knowledge. They can also rate the project’s ongoing education programme, which focuses on the development of digital content.

Submission deadline: 15 July 2022

Note: We are referring here to the call issued by the project coordinator Stiftung Digitale Chancen, looking specifically for German-speaking participants as reference group. For more information and contact details, please see the ‘Call for Participation’ below.