Research review: How to promote social media uptake in VET and adult training - Project SVEA

Research review: How to promote social media uptake in VET and adult training systems in Europe - practical example of the European project "SVEA".  T. Toole ea (2010), eLearning Papers http://www.elearningeuropa.info/en/article/How-to-promote-social-media-uptake-in-VET-and-adult-training-systems-in-Europe-%E2%80%93-practical-example-of-the-%E2%80%9CSVEA%E2%80%9D-Europea

This article demonstrates the barriers and challenges offered by web 2.0 tools, which currently influencing the European training systems. It is based on the results emerging form the SVEA project following a regional analysis on the uptake of social media in VET and adult training system in Europe.

The most important challenges according to this article are:
- overcoming barriers of acceptance
- overcoming technological barriers
- innovating the management structure of VET institutions

The main benefits this article mentions are:
- the high level of collaboration; learning becoming more interactive and also personalized
- increasing cost effectiveness; not using classrooms and other rescoures

Further, this article outlines some trends that are likely to mark the VET and adult training environment in the next years.

1. Training at work is becoming more important
2. A mixture of face-to-face and online training is important
3. The trainer's role will change to moderator
4. Users of social media will combine the functionalities they require on the same website. 

At final, the very interesting actions the project SVEA has undertaken are:

1. The development of a collaborative online platform offering a range of different web 2.0 tools to be used by learners and learning institutions; http://openatrium.com. The home page of the group space is a dashboard with several customizable mini widgets.
2. The development of short training modules that supports trainers to understand how to use social media for learning purpose and get acquainted with them; http://www.svea-project.eu/svea_training.html

Those two outcomes of the project are very usefull to assist institutions to adapt new online technologies and are well worthy for further exploration!