This is one of 23 free online 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 contexts found in European countries presents quite a challenge, so this is a remarkable achievement.
The courses are delivered through a Moodle VLE (virtual learning environment). All courses are provided in English, and many are available in additional European languages – Spanish in this case.
This goal of this course ‘Volunteering with Minors under Social Exclusion’ is to enable students to develop volunteer activities with minors under social exclusion, promoting teamwork, equality and social skills. It comprises 3 modules:
- Minors and Social Exclusion
- Models of Caring For Children and Volunteering
- Developing Social Skills and Other Actions
The course is informative, well structured and straightforward to follow. It comes with the full range of Moodle features – a tutor, study calendar, multimedia content, forums, graded quizzes and assignments – offering an engaging way to learn. Students are allowed three months to complete courses they register for, and I estimate this course takes 15 – 20 hours to study.
Individual documents etc. can be downloaded, but I can’t see a way to download a whole course package for offline study, and I haven’t been able to establish the copyright position of these courses.
cyp-media.org 