The Gaming for
Mutual Learning in Elder Care (GAMLEC) project is about promoting high quality standards in elder care
The importance of this issue
Population ageing is a trend which began decades ago in Europe and is to be considered a long-term process. EU Member States are facing an increasing demand for long-term care in homes for dependent seniors because of these demographic changes. Hence the increase in the demand for qualified and skilled professional carers and volunteers in a tight labour market.
Education and continuous training are needed to keep up with new technologies and healthcare requirements aimed at guaranteeing the quality of life of care home residents, while taking into account the needs of their families too. Family members do not often know how to provide services to meet the special needs of dependent old persons. Collaboration and mutual understanding with care givers are not easy. Care homes have to draw upon a workforce with low educational level and/or limited language proficiency (immigrants) because of limited resources. Volunteers often have no specific qualification.
The GAMLEC project aims at providing an easy-to-access and playful way to acquire and share knowledge and competencies by means of a board game with learning card decks. It is available free of charge on a publicly accessible e-learning platform that also provides all necessary guidelines, instructions, related materials and further information too. A broader and easy-to-access knowledge on standards of quality for dependent seniors enables the target group to make a contribution to a sector characterised by a lack of professional carers.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The direct target group is a mix of professional carers, carers with low education level and/or migration background and scarce language proficiency, volunteers in care homes and committed family members of dependent senior citizens.
The indirect target group consists of dependent senior citizens, who will benefit from improved quality of life, and care facilities that will have a low-cost training tool to provide training when and where it is needed. In this way they can all draw on a better trained workforce and benefit from greater mutual understanding between the different stakeholders. Collaboration between all parties involved is therefore increased and enhanced.
Objectives
The aim of the Erasmus+ GAMLEC project is to provide training that:
Promotes high quality standards in the elderly care
… through mutual understanding, team work, knowledge sharing among co-workers, volunteers and families.
Takes scarcity of resources into consideration
… and is therefore provided directly by the organisations: when, where and what is needed.
Makes learning easy, and complex content accessible
… to people with a lower education level and limited language proficiency as well as to target groups with no professional background (volunteers and seniors’ relatives).
Is innovative
A game-based learning approach is chosen focusing on the contributions made by different partners with mutual benefits through sharing best practices in contents and procedures across borders.
Process
from September 2019 to November 2021 in order to:
based on the analysis of the state-of-the-art European and global standards.
• that makes learning of topics related to standards for quality of life for dependent seniors easy, playful and sustainable,
• that is appealing to as many people of the target groups as possible,
• that helps increasing mutual understanding among all stakeholders involved in homes for dependent old people,
• that is designed to facilitate future development as conditions or contexts may change.
• whose content reflects content-wise the state-of-the-art of standards
for quality of life for dependent seniors,
• that is methodologically based on the educational framework,
• whose guidelines are written and presented in a way that makes self-driven learning easy and appealing.
• that acts as a doorway to learning for interested people,
• that includedi the compendium, teaching materials, such as the board game with all its parts and templates, the guidelines, the educational framework, related articles and further information,
• tailored to the target-group (user-centred ) and high-quality,
• that it is flexible and can be easily adapted to different levels of previous knowledge and main interests of players; some may wish to focus more on theoretical inputs, others on practical experiences.
• offering interactivity between players
• available free of charge.
Project results
GAMLEC delivers motivational and inspirational results that promote getting to know each other, building relationships and playing. It also expands knowledge while improving communication, mutual understanding and cooperation.
The board game and its card decks can be adapted by the users to their specific needs and thematically developed further.
The e-learning platform also offers guidelines to set up the game, the Educational Framework with in-depth information about game-based-learning, and a forum to exchange experiences, discuss and suggest improvements to the game as well as give feedback.
All project results are available free of charge as Open Educational Resources on the project’s e-learning platform in English, German, Italian, Lithuanian and Dutch:
Partners
Co-Funding
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.