European Year of Skills and Cultural Heritage: What, How, Why?

Digitisation of cultural heritage available by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, or GLAM institutions, is essential in preserving, studying, and promoting European cultural resources. On the other hand, developing digital competences for EU citizens is crucial in accessing information, acquiring knowledge, enhancing employability, and fostering inclusion in our societies. Therefore, the European Commission has set targets in the European skills agenda and the digital education action plan to ensure that 70% of adults have basic digital skills by 2025.

2023 – 2024 European Year of Skills

The EU has thus provided funding and support to actions that foster European citizens’ upskilling, helping them realise their dreams and having a fresh start if needed, throughout their lives. You can visit the platform ‘What the EU is doing for you’ to explore how you relate to the initiatives taken on fields such as skills for jobs, digital skills, green skills, transversal skills, skills for youth, and gender equality. The European Year of Skills started officially on 9 May 2023 and will run until 8 May 2024.

Digital competences and the DigComp Framework

People’s participation in democratic dialogue and achieving social inclusion, economic growth, and well-being are connected to digital competences enhancement. The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp) provides a common understanding of digital competence while identifying the key components of digital competence in 5 areas: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem-solving.

Digital cultural heritage and teacher empowerment

As part of the European Commission’s digital inclusion and empowerment scheme, Europeana jointly with European Schoolnet offers an array of activities to reinforce European teachers, with relevance to the aforementioned pillars. The MOOC Digital Education with Cultural Heritage, an annual training tool to help educators integrate digital culture into any discipline or subject, strengthens communication and collaboration. The training courses and the national activities run by the Europeana ambassadors offer relevant information and learning. Various activities focusing on digital skills development on the topic of cultural heritage, such as the GIF IT UP competition promote digital content creation. The different Europeana competitions improve digital and data literacy. This is done by encouraging educators to find innovative ways of using Europeana arts and digital science heritage in their educational activities.

Europeana and Digital competences for students

Besides educators, thousands of students have been supported in becoming more digitally competent by getting in touch with structured activities and learning scenarios in digital and blended form. Moreover, they have access to ample digitized content such as private and public galleries, images, sound, 3D objects available in Europeana. Let us mention some highlights, for example, the participation in educational challenges like the one run by the ‘Built with Bits’ programme, awareness of hotly debated topics such as Artificial Intelligence by implementing relevant learning scenarios, involvement in Stories of Implementation with emphasis on inclusion, exchange of ideas and production of materials, visibility of their work in relevant publications.

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PDM 1.0 DEED: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the European Heritage Awards Archive.

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