Along with the tourism sector, cultural and creative sectors are among the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis has had its toll with major disruptions in visitation, being the hardest hit by social distancing measures, described as a culture shock; this resulted in an undeniable financial impact on the running of small and medium sized arts and culture institutions. This turnaround of events, led the sector to rapidly accelerated digitalisation. The response from the vast majority of these institutions in Europe included a rapid shift towards digital visitation and digital curation. This ‘forced’ shift for cultural organisations to focus on their “virtual museum resources, e-learning, and online collections”, exposed some of the pre-existing vulnerabilities in the cultural sector, especially in relation to digital curation and the lack of digital skills among cultural professionals.
The Erasmus+ Project “BoostDigiCulture” seeks to tackle these challenges and hopes to set the foundation for a sustainable and inclusive professional development framework of open educational resources and practices, designed to enhance the digital competences of cultural professionals with low digital skills, especially those working in small and medium sized cultural institutions in the partner countries and beyond.
The main project objectives are:
- to enhance the capacity of adult cultural professionals in implementing digital culture in their institutional agenda
- to promote awareness on the importance of digital readiness and training for adult cultural professionals for institutional resilience and sustainability
- to design, implement and validate a sustainable professional development framework of resources and services for digital upskilling of these adult learners
- support adult cultural professionals to safeguard the inclusive nature of digital culture through their online institutional offerings
- provide evidence about online audience engagement and interaction with digital culture
For this purpose, partners will develop the following project results:
PR1 – BoostDigiCulture e-learning platform for digital cultural affinity spaces
PR2 – BoostDigiCulture Professional Digital competence Profile (PDP)
PR3 – BoostDigiCulture Microlearning upskilling programme
PR4 – BoostDigiCulture Self-assessment tool
The consortium of the project consists of 6 European Organizations: Stiftung Digitale Chancen from Germany (Coordinator), Synthesis Center for Research and Education Limited from Cyprus, Exeo Lab form Italy, Innovation Hive from Greece, Rightchallenge – Associação from Portugal and Icarus Hrvatska from Croatia.
Two meetings have already been scheduled by the consortium. The first one, the Kick-Off Meeting of the project will take place online on 23th & 24th of February in order to facilitate the first steps of the project’s management and implementation. The second one, the Transnational Project Meeting will take place in July in Potenza, Italy in order to present the status of the project and discuss the next steps of the implementation process.
