Introduction

Welcome to the fourth Connecting EU newsletter. March 2022 was a very busy month for the project and we were excited to travel again after so long "on pause".

HAK1 Salzburg in Austria was delighted to welcome 16 participants from our partner organisations for a workshop on webshops and learning platform development.

Video conference

On 3 March the participant schools held a video conference to discuss the upcoming mobility. We discussed how to manage COVID during the mobility, finalised the programme, shared travel arrangements etc. We also agreed to buy the euconnecting.eu web domain. 

The mobility

From 13 to 18 March 2022, 16 participants from Spain, Finland, the Czech Republic and Germany travelled to Salzburg for a webshop development workshop.

The work didn’t start terribly well, Austria was experiencing an Omicron spike and both teachers organising the mobility (Graham Crewe and Silvia Forsthuber) being in covid quarantine! This made it extremely tricky to coordinate and lead the workshop, but we have all learnt so much about video conferencing and being flexible in the last couple of years, and the five HAK1 Salzburg participants, Katarina, Szimonetta, Kilian, Anna, and Victoria from 4BK did a tremendous job in helping make it work!

We took extra precuations throughout the mobility due to Omicron - chiefly wearing masks at all times indoors - and happily there were no positive tests either on or after the mobility.

Monday

The first morning was Monday and following introductions and a school tour the highlight was a social media influencer workshop led by local social media guru as well as opera singer, artist and TV producer/director, Erin Snell. She taught us many things, not least of which was the importance of showing but not telling through our Instagram stories.

Monday afternoon was time for a 6km walking tour of Salzburg city and the Mönchsberg. Students and teachers set off in small groups in fabulous weather guided by a route arranged via the Komoot hiking app on their mobile phones. 

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning participants were introduced to the concept of the “SMART practice company”, demonstrating the tools we use to create a paperless and efficient office in the our viirtual companies. This was followed by setting up the actual workshop for the week. Students were allocated to five groups of mixed nationalities to work on webshop development.

Each group had a different theme: the products, the multilanguage interface, legal aspects of running a webshop, market research and marketing. They were given goals for the week, tasks to achieve and help to do the work. Initially daunting, the groups quickly divided their work up and set about understanding their tasks.

Wednesday

On Wednesday morning we had arranged a seminar with a lawyer from Salzburg law firm, Rechtsanwälte Zumtobel Kronberger, who taught our legal team about the legal aspects of running a business online. We were given a lot of material which we were able to incorporate into our work.

Our multi-language interface team conducted a fascinating depth interview with Muhanad Alhamdani who first came to Austria as an Iraqi refugee in 2015. One of the key goals of our project from the outset was to provide support to refugees in their learning, so it was a wonderful opportunity to meet with Muhanad, learn about his horrific experiences in Iraq, his family’s traumatic escape to Austria, and how he has built a life in Austria, as well as to find out from him how he thinks our project might be able to help future refugees.

Wednesday afternoon was the time to learn at first hand about the SMART practice companies in Austria. Participants were welcomed into the 4BK practice companies Toys4u GmbH and Shopping Point Gmbh where the “employees” presented their businesses. The Erasmus+ participants then did job shadowing in the marketing, sales, purchasing and accounting departments for the afternoon. They made sales, held sales phone calls, bought from the webshop system, booked purchases and sales in accounting, and created marketing materials. A very full afternoon.

Thursday

Thursday was spent rushing to complete our project work. Content was written for the webshop, our Terms and Conditions were finalized, market research was analysed and presented, marketing materials were completed and product details were uploaded to the webshop. On top of all of this, screencasts were recorded and lessons were created for our learning platform.

That evening it was already time for our final meal together at Krimpelstätter, a celebration of all we had achieved and new friendships made.

Our new Online Weltladen shop logo

We took the opportunity to develop the original Weltladen shop logo...

...and develop it for the webshop logo to incorporate some COnnecting EU branding:

We felt that it was important to stay true to the branding of the physical Weltladen shop whilst clearly communicating our project through its well-know "Robin" characters.

Weltladen poster

Friday

And before we knew it Friday had arrived. It was time to complete and present our work, sharing what we had done with the whole team. We had achieved a lot, but a lot of work remained to put all this content online on our learning platform.

Participants left with posters we printed on our new Erasmus+-financed poster printer.

Overall, the mobility was a huge success, and a vital contribution to the goals and output of the Connecting EU project.

Ukraine

The mobility took place somewhat in the shadow of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. We wanted to show our solidarity towards the people of Ukraine, and designed this poster.

Final impressions

What's next?

Next we move on to Kokemäki in Finland in May 2022 for our final mobility, focusing on automation.

The small print

Feedback? Please email us: we would love to hear from you.

Connecting VET for the European Digital Single Market (Connecting EU) Erasmus+ project © 2022 by Kuniberg Berufskolleg Recklinghausen is licensed under CC BY 4.0

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.