Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities affirms the right to education as a fundamental one. As the European Union has limited competences in the field, responsibility for the inclusion of people with disabilities lies with the Member states, within their borders.
According to the European Disability Forum 2021 findings, the impact of lockdowns and remote learning realities have impacted Differently abled Students vastly. The situation forced them to adapt to the new learning realities without proper preparation in terms of access and policy dimension support. This lead to great casualties within the target groups in terms of inclusion, well-being and support to differently abled persons.
With this project, the partners aim at addressing the needs of differently abled students with hearing/vision impairments for a tailor-made curriculum and service for education as well as a facilitated need for transition to work-based learning (WBL). Furthermore, the consortium will address the need for a systematic change in the inclusion of the target groups into the job market after they finish their studies.
The project will offer innovative new services for remote curricula and study to WBL transition in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) that uses best practices of already existing curricula, ICT tools and remote learning programs in order to build a suite of embedded learning educational resources to build key transversal skills of Differently abled Students in Entrepreneurship.
The project offers an innovative approach to the quality monitoring of its outcomes and outputs. Essentially, the partnership will work directly with the target groups to test the accessibility and sustainability of each output. Moreover, control groups will be set to provide feedback and recommendations in the form of Inclusion Quality (IQ) reports. IQ reports will be used to adapt the project results to the needs of the target groups.
The DIFFABILITY project is developing (1) a Service Pack based on the state-of-art and needs analysis of the target groups; (2) a remote and accessible Learning Curriculum for HEIs, adapted to Differently Abled Students with visual/ hearing impairment; and (3) a Transition Pack adapted for the successful shift to WBL of Differently Abled Students.
OTB Europe is the lead organisation and implementing the project with 6 partners: VYTAUTO DIDZIOJO UNIVERSITETAS (Lithuania); UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI (Slovenia); Italienische Handelskammer München-Stuttgart Camera di Commercio Italo – Tedesca (Germany); CHAMBRE DE COMMERCE BELGO-ITALIENNEASBL (Belgium); Egitimde Gorme Engelliler Dernegi (Turkey); TURKIYE GENCLIK BIRLIGI DERNEGI (Turkey).