A Franchise Handbook is finalized within the Signs for Europe project. This franchise handbook is linked with the franchise contract (concluded between the franchisor and the franchisee). It describes the whole equalizent franchise system. The major components are: The success model of equalizent and the philosophy of equalizent, the market and the underlying business model, the courses, the profiles of a potential franchisee, structure and services of the social franchise headquarter, the structure and infrastructure of a competence centre (established from a franchisee), controlling, benchmarking and quality standards, communication principles, PR and Marketing approach including IPR. The rights and duties of the franchisor and the franchisees are defined.
The didactic concepts and training materials used in equalizent so far are reviewed, revised and standardized. The franchisee get detailed descriptions of the structure, content and curricula’s of all ten courses in the franchise system. The didactic concepts are described, for the training materials instructions are written. Both are linked with the courses and special training situations (e.g. conflicts). The trainers of the franchisees can easily search and find required material.
A professional franchise collaboration tool is set up to support this search with the extensive number of instructions and materials (over 2.000 pages).
Special eLearnings based on the idea of gamification are developed. These eLearnings offers deaf people a new level of learning languages. Why? Over the years, trainers at equalizent discovered that basic language learners were struggling at learning new vocabulary and grammar at home or anywhere else but at the training centre itself. There were many online tools to learn any kind of language for hearing people, but no access for deaf learners. Everything was based on words (verbal and written) and on pictures at most. Explanatory videos had subtitles, but they were pretty poor most of the time. That’s how equalizent decided to produce barrier-free eLearning herself. Barrier-free means, that access is easy even for basic learners, which implies that:
• Sign Language has to be the primary language with German as a second language (this suggests that a huge volume of videos was produced for that purpose within the Signs for Europe project).
• To guarantee barrier-free access to basic language learners it is essential that the beginners’ content is covered by Sign Language videos and pictures. In a further step, words can be provided. This is a crucial point, as visual access for deaf learners is the only barrier-free way to learn new vocabulary at the beginning. At a higher level it turns out difficult to capture every new word or sign in a picture so at certain levels, less to no pictures are used but signed videos and written words.
The design of the eLearnings is barrier-free.
CI, PR and Marketing
The CI for the franchise system (e.g. colours, logos) designed, templates based on these CI are worked out (e.g. business cards, letters). A social media appearance is already started.
A homepage that belongs to potential franchisees is designed and online (
https://www.equalizent.eu/en-EU/landing(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)).
