In Croatia

I have been traveling a lot recently, going from project to project as a participant, group leader, and facilitator/organizer. Following Remote Control-DYW: TC “Virtual Facilitators” that was held in Trikala, Greece between the 25th of February and 7th of March 2022. I went to a training in Norway supported by my National Agency, had my own Youth Exchange in Croatia called CineWar, and followed it with an Ecopreneur training in The Netherlands. I’m currently in Turkey on a Youth Exchange and to say it lightly this has been an incredible stretch of knowledge, experience, and connections generated in a short time frame. All the projects combined confirmed to me that I have a place in the Erasmus+ world as an organizer and facilitator of high-quality Youth Exchanges and Traning Courses.

At Ecopreneur I got a chance, an open space to disseminate two of the projects I recently took part in. One was Remote Control, and another one was CineWar I with help from other people in my organization, organized and facilitated. I honestly gave more attention to CineWar because of my connection to it but started with the general question of dissemination. What is dissemination? Why is dissemination important? In which ways are we doing it? What are the positive effect of quality dissemination for the organization as well as for the participants that are disseminating, and people that are listening, watching, or interacting within the dissemination? Some participants were aware of the answers, but even though we were on a Training Course, a lot of them weren’t. I found that a bit surprising, but then at the same time I could understand it, because dissemination is oftentimes a part of the project that is left forgotten, as organizations don’t put enough emphasis on it, and participants don’t understand what it is, which leads them to not take them as seriously as they should. I let participants that know the answers explain them to the ones that don’t, and if it was needed I gave some extra information on the answers to each question. Other than a lot of participants not understanding what is dissemination, I also realized that a lot of them have negative views on it, and even said openly that they are only doing it to gain back the reimbursement. Personally as a leader of an organization that makes me sad, but I also understand that not all participants have the same level of engagement with a certain project so that they can have the right motivation to facilitate it. Another issue that is raised here is a difference in quality that I can get behind as well. Well-organized and run projects are easy to disseminate because we feel motivated to talk about them as much as possible, and to as many people as possible. Projects that are done on lower quality are hard to disseminate, because you might want to forget them, and move on, not reflecting on the learning outcomes that weren’t fulfilled.

Following the long introduction to dissemination as a whole, I dived into the Remote Control project. I talked about how we learned to incorporate online teaching platforms within the educational system in a way that young people enjoy the lectures, and are more interactive and fun. I was explaining how challenging it is sometimes to have the same impact online you would have in life, and many of the participants emphasized that, as they faced the same difficulties, especially in the last two years when due to covid most of the classes transferred to online. We had a small discussion about the possibilities of making online education fun, interesting, practical, and engaging. A lot of people were pessimistic about it, but some could with a help of my guidance find a common ground on how to improve online education. Following the discussion, I shared with participants some useful tools like Zoom, Webex, Trello, Canva, and more, that they can use in online education to put it on another level. I didn’t have much time, but I briefly explained how each of those tools works and shared with them the access links.

To conclude the Remote Control dissemination I told them a couple of words about organizing, and partnering organizations, and where to find them.

Article by Luka Koski from Croatia