7. Using case stories and multimedia products as means to promote knowledge sharing

Taking the account the different preconditions for country-specific piloting and analyses, the WLP project has given a major role for ‘case stories’ and for multimedia products.

7a. With the ‘case stories’ the WLP project has given the national partners the possibility to illustrate their approach to piloting and to highlight their specific experiences:

1. The German case stories focus on the development of a networked partnership arrangement with a focus on curriculum redesign. The stories highlight the importance of teachers’ and trainers’ joint working groups in linking this cooperation to regional innovation agendas.
2. The UK case stories present firstly the working concept of a quality improvement scheme within a supply chain. Then the complementary stories present the insights into the implementation and into related learning processes within different companies.
3. The Italian case stories focus on the process of developing a regional learning community that seeks to promote different areas of workplace learning. The stories highlight the evolutionary phases and the role of facilitation and external support.
4. The Slovenian case stories focus on diverse elements of a local micro-piloting agenda that extends the networking of a regional VET College. The stories highlight the firstly the internal initiatives of the college and then outreach initiatives that involve local enterprises.
5. The French case stories present a contrast between two types of partnership concepts and related patterns of networking. The traditional approach to regional networking is based on ad hoc partnerships and targeted use of formal and non-formal learning provisions. The trans-national approach is presented by a company-specific programme that links training and workplace learning periods from three countries to a joint programme.
6. The Estonian case stories present the preconditions for regional partnership development and networked learning in Southern Estonia. The complementary story presents the local partners’ views on the usability of the European partners’ ideas and experiences in Estonia.

7b. The role of the multimedia products is to provide a rich resource base that illustrates key issues in the WLP activities. This resource area emphasises the fact that the production of multimedia resources is no longer an exclusive activity to be handed over to external specialists. To a large extent multimedia contents can be produced and made available as users’ media. In the context of workplace learning multimedia contents can be used either as support for learning arrangements or as support for planning and dissemination activities. In this respect the WLP project has collected and produced a wide gallery of multimedia resources. Below some examples are characterised briefly regarding their main characteristics and their usability:

1. Videos that have been originally produced in the context of the WLP project (e.g. the Slovenian video on integrative working and learning tasks or the French video on the training cooperation of a regional enterprise);
2. Videos that have been edited and refocused for the WLP project (e.g. the video on the trans-national training cooperation between three countries);
3. Short video clips that have been extracted from larger video materials that present workplace learning in different countries;
4. Expert interviews (audios) that present European experts’ views on current challenges for promoting workplace learning.

The WLP project invites the users to explore the multimedia resources on the basis of their interests and provides support for focused searches and targeted selections.