Equal - Digital Repository

The Development Parnership seeks to harness innovative web-enabled ICT solutions to deliver the following:

• An extensive and extended community of interest that can collaborate and share knowledge resources in order to further develop best practice in the field of developing equality of opportunity within the Welsh labour market
• A suite of bilingual awareness raising modules that can be rapidly and flexibly deployed. Designed to roll-out training to a large number of people, with a flexible learning solution.
• E-learning materials that are culturally contextualized and operate on the affective domain of learning in addition to the cognitive domain

Objectives

The Development Partnership will develop and test innovative approaches to the use of ICT for deploying effective awareness raising training of diversity issues across large numbers of geographical distributed people. This will include:

1. Test and promote new ways of tackling discrimination through awareness raising for those who work across a range and types of organisation and sectors. This will be done by consulting, designing, developing, deploying, and evaluating 6 e-learning modules across a range of organisations and sectors.
2. Develop and test new training material with 6 e-learning modules raising awareness of gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, age, and religious belief. Most importantly the modules will seek to engage the affective domain of learning as well as the cognitive or knowledge based domain. The DP will test and pilot new approaches to the training material. Materials & resources will be used drawing on the linguistic, cultural and historical content of Wales.
3. Encourage new uses of ICT by all partners and participants and provide sufficient training to allow participants and partners to take advantage of, and be able to participate in, a collaborative online network, through a VLE, where they can work and learn together.
4. Improve the work-life balance of partners through innovative approaches to inter-partnership communication and collaboration that reduces the time, costs and stress associated with travelling to meetings. This will also empower partners and participants to have more control over their time and when they choose to work with the DP.
5. Empower participants and groups who suffer discrimination by involving them in the design of the modules. This consultation will form a part of the design and evaluation parts of the development process.
6. Empower participants by enabling them to provide feedback and comments on how they see discrimination in their own work context. This will both engage each learner and also provide valuable feedback to the project and the organisation about examples of discrimination and good practice.
7. To develop the partnership to model the key principles of EQUAL and to provide leadership with examples of best practice, to all partners and beyond, of effective policies and practices.
8. To disseminate and mainstream the results and conclusions of the research to the TNG and policy makers and practitioners through academic papers, a conference, published report and regular newsletters.