Social Innovation Education (SIE) and innovation skills are needed for a just, sustainable, prosperous and inclusive European future. The NEMESIS project (
http://nemesis-edu.eu/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) devoted the last four years to research, testing and experimentation activities in close collaboration with schools, teachers, students, parents, Social Innovation Practitioners (SIPs), education experts and policymakers. As a result, rich data and insightful findings were produced that now open new pathways for promoting and mainstreaming SIE.
To support teachers and students NEMESIS has created a Social Innovation Learning Framework (SILF) that includes 13 competencies necessary for social innovation, alongside practical tools, to improve the teaching and learning of core change-making skills and competencies. The NEMESIS SILF has been evaluated with great success during the two pilot periods, with more than 40 schools working on social innovation projects and more than 5000 students directly affected and involved and more than 10000 being aware of the project and its objectives. The results show that the NEMESIS SILF is inclusive and beneficial for all students including those socially, economically, mentally, healthy and emotionally disadvantaged. More than 150 teachers have been trained by NEMESIS and at least another 150 have attended NEMESIS information events. More than 16.000 headteachers and deputy headteachers across Europe were made aware of the NEMESIS.
Furthermore, the project developed a number of digital assets to support the introduction of SIE into schools. The digital assets include a Social Innovation Open Learning Platform (
https://nemesis.odl.org/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) to offer a protected workspace for collaboration on projects and content generation, a NEMESIS MOOC (
https://nemesismooc.odl.org/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) to support teachers continuous development and training and a Serious Game (
https://changemakergame.ili.eu/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) to assist with the introduction of SI concepts to a younger audience in a more playful manner. All digital assets will remain open and available to interested stakeholders for at least 5 years.
NEMESIS had a very successful dissemination strategy through its online and social media presence with thousands of followers. The project’s website had 11,000 users who visited the website with 16,000 sessions in total and 36,772 pages viewed. The NEMESIS Facebook page built an online community around the project with 2,000 like and 2,045 followers and a total of 468 publications. The NEMESIS Twitter account has 1,584 followers with a total of 1,159 publications.
Finally, the project produced a large number of good practices, training tools and resources as well as information and evidence about the impact of SIE. To make SIE viable and sustainable in the long term it is essential for good practices and resources to be scaled up. The project has already placed solid foundations as far as its exploitation and sustainability concerns. It is already expanding the NEMESIS approach into different educational areas, grades and geographical areas through additional funding. The new projects will increase dramatically the impact of the project and will validate the approach of the NEMESIS SIE event further.