I’ve recently been very impressed by some free courses offered by the online European School of Volunteering (EVS), a collaboration between Spanish, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greek and Italian organizations that was established as part of the 2011 Year of Volunteering. The task of producing multi-lingual courses that are applicable across the wide range of 3rd sector contexts found in European countries presents quite a challenge. The attractive, high quality free learning materials produced by EVS are therefore a particularly remarkable achievement, showing what can be achieved through collaborative working.
EVS currently offers 23 free online courses delivered through a Moodle VLE (virtual learning environment). All courses are provided in English, and many are available in additional European languages. Although there’s lots of material to download I’m not sure about the copyright position of the courses and can’t see a Creative Commons logo anywhere. Do any readers know more about this?
I’ve enrolled on three courses in order to review them for this blog:
- Fundraising
- Communication techniques and skills
- New technologies for senior citizens
The course objectives and content are summarised below.
Course objectives: To enable the students to identify, locate and take advantage of these sources of funding, knowing how to use the most appropriate techniques and processes as well as the latest trends in fundraising. The modules are:
- Fundraising and Fundraiser
- Planning, Design and Implementation of a Fundraising Program
- Techniques for Increasing Fundraising
- Evaluation
Course objectives: To ensure that the volunteer acquires the skills necessary in order to communicate correctly with the beneficiaries of their activity, encouraging assertiveness, empathy and feedback. The modules are:
- Concept of Communication
- Verbal Communication
- Non Verbal Communication
Course objectives: Ageing populations pose major economic, budgetary and social challenges. New technologies, addressing solutions for distant monitoring services are a social necessity and a field of great interest for the world of volunteering. The modules are:
- Ageing Population (2 Hours).
- New Technologies for Assisted-Independent Living (10 Hours)
- Application and Case Studies (4 Hours)
The courses were very informative, well structured and straightforward to follow. They come with the full range of Moodle features – a tutor, study calendar, module content, forums, graded quizzes and assignments – offering an engaging way to learn about important aspects of 3rd sector work. I can’t see a way to download a whole course package for offline study so if you visit the
EVS website, perhaps you could check this out and report back via this blog.
About Tony
Tony is a regional academic at the Open University in the South West and a Fellow of the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education.
Thanks for this post, Tony.
This seems like a great resource, though I’ve had problems with the site – I don’t think it’s compatible for those using a chrome browser?
Peter
Good point Peter, thanks. I first accessed the home-page through Chrome and experienced overlapping lists, so I tried Internet Explorer – and it was the same! I also found it slow to load in both.
I haven’t had any such problems with the actual content pages – have you progressed that far?
Tony
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