The Department of Adult & Community Education at Maynooth University is a partner in MICRO - Enhancing Competitiveness of Microenterprises in Rural Areas, a project co-funded by the European Programme Erasmus Plus. This transnational consortium led by Irish Rural Link, involves seven project partners from six countries (Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Macedonia and Spain).
MICRO has developed 39 training courses in five different languages, in response to primary and secondary research carried out in six countries, to identify needs of microenterprises in rural areas to enhance their competitiveness and support their growth in Europe. The online training modules are currently being tested with relevant users in a pilot phase, before being available as a free open educational resource (OER) for rural micro-enterprises on MICRO project website.
The open educational resource training highlights the important role of distance learning in meeting the needs of micro-enterprises in rural areas, where access to training is often inhibited by factors such as geographical isolation and time and costs involved in reaching training courses in urban centres.
The MICRO project consortium has developed a short video guide and useful overview of the MICRO OER Platform, information about the partners and their activities as well as access to MICRO's training courses. Given the large number of training courses developed, the video guide is particularly helpful in enhancing accessibility and assisting users to select the most relevant topics for their needs. The OER Platform demo is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abwP5CrH-VI&feature=youtu.be
The Department of Adult and Community Education at Maynooth University is a leader in adult education research in Ireland and has an excellent international reputation for work in further education, higher education, adult guidance, community development and transformative learning. Participation in European and international research is part of the remit of the Department..
For further information on the MICRO Project, please contact:
Michael Kenny on michael.kenny@mu.ie or Siobhán O’Malley on Siobhan.omalley@mu.ie or see the MICROmetraining
