CORDIS

Europe is facing various sustainability challenges from high youth unemployment to the economic crisis and migration, underlying the urgent need for the creation of new solutions and the adoption of new paradigms for change that will promote sustainable growth and improve societal conditions such as inequality, poverty and social exclusion. European education systems continue to fall short in providing the skills we will need to be productive contributors in the future.
NEMESIS aims to create a new educational model that will harvest students’ knowhow and further build on their inherent skills as a means to improve their capabilities and drive social change. NEMESIS enables students to become creative social thinkers, develop entrepreneurial mind-sets and become social change makers into a world where inequality, poverty and social exclusion are still quite evident.
The project’s vision is to serve as catalyst for innovative, engaging and interdisciplinary learning. NEMESIS presents a new approach towards the attainment of Social Innovation (SI) skills by combining innovative learning models, open technologies and participatory relations and processes
NEMESIS offers a new approach to education, teaching and learning whereby students are engaged in a collective learning model that builds on collaborative partnerships among education, social innovators, and community and where the exchange of practical ideas is at the core of the process so that students will acquire the knowledge and skills they need in order to become the future Social Innovators of Europe and thrive in a world where challenges and change are endless and where learning never stops.
NEMESIS has outlined a set of specific objectives to achieve its outcomes. These objectives are:
• To design a unique framework for teaching social innovation skills to young people of primary and secondary education level
• To improve teaching and learning practices in skills based education
• To develop a European wide community of SIPs
• To develop an online platform that will grant open access to social innovation
• To ensure equal opportunities to SI education for all including those from disadvantaged backgrounds
• To break down barriers to organisational change and foster a new culture of open collective learning targeted to SI education
• To evaluate the added value of the NEMESIS model and encourage its wide uptake

The NEMESIS project had planned a large number of deliverables to be completed on the first year of its life span. In total 16 deliverables have been submitted to the commission. The work has primarily focused on delivering high quality deliverables and developing the NEMESIS SI Open Learning Platform. All objectives have been met successfully.
One important element of the NEMESIS project is the SI Open Learning Platform. The platform was released on month 10 to the members of the consortium for use in order to identify its functionalities and its performance based on the system requirements identified from the proposal and the partners survey. All the identified requirements have been fulfilled. The platform also is used as a communication platform between the consortium members and as a secure cloud storage area.
The next NEMESIS result is the Social innovation learning framework. Currently there such a framework does not exist in education and NEMESIS is ambitious to introduce its approach. The learning framework will be tested in the piloting and changes will be introduces depending on the evaluation outcome.
Another important aspect of the project so far is the completion of the training workshop with 30 participants.
The development of the NEMESIS website and dissemination plan and activities have also been vital for the project and allowed to reach thousands of people in 6 six languages (GR, DE, FR, ES, P, and UK). Furthermore, the logo and the visual identity of the project was created.

Collective learning, co-design and co-creation, open learning platform, are only some of the elements that distinguishes NEMESIS and help us advance beyond the state of the art. Based on a state of the art analysis that have been performed, here is how NEMESIS differs from existing relevant educational offerings:
• The first element is the emphasis of NEMESIS to open education for all. None of the existing offerings provides open access to their educational models, programmes and resources. NEMESIS involves the development of the SI Open learning platform, using open source software, an important tool to improve teaching practices since it will offer open access to both training and educational resources to teachers and enable them to apply the NEMESIS model at their schools. At the same, this platform facilitates the creation of a community of practice (CoP) for teachers in social innovation education, something that is missing at a European level.
• NEMESIS is flexible and will be developed in a way to be easily adopted by all, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• NEMESIS aims to engage students into a participatory process where students are not only participants in a collaborative process but they are co-creators of the knowledge per se through the organisation and implementation of co-creation labs.
• The NEMESIS educational model is built together with those already having the skills and mind-sets related to social innovation. Social innovation practitioners participate in the consortium of this project not just to interact with students during the pilots but also to provide their insights for the development of the educational model.
• NEMESIS introduces young people and educational stakeholders to key co-creation and collective intelligence principles through “commonspoly”, a ground-breaking board game that changes the story of the popular game “monopoly”.
• Emphasis is also put on collective learning, collective intelligence whereby through NEMESIS, students work in teams and, therefore, design their projects and prepare their digital stories. As a result, online learning communities among students from different schools are being created sharing, interacting and exchanging views and opinions online with respect to their digital stories.
• NEMESIS creates a European Community of Social Innovation Practitioners committed to help students learning journeys through mentoring and motivation. In that way, NEMESIS ensures that any educational institution/community applying the NEMESIS model will be able to easily involve a SIP in its activities.
• Nemesis supports the development and availability of open educational resources (OER).
• The NEMESIS model focuses on the development of social Innovation skills in combination with digital literacy skills by engaging students in digital storytelling.
• NEMESIS creates an SI Open learning platform which offers open access to training and educational resources, to the SIP community and to best practices. The platform is based on Ilias which is open source and will remain accessible well beyond the end of the project, enabling teachers to apply the NEMESIS model at their schools.