Description
GOAL Project(http://goal.csd.auth.gr/) aims to support active and non-active athletes in the development of their professional endeavours, after the end of their athletic career. The project attempts to create awareness on dual careers by providing an enabling environment for addresssing athletes’ dual career incommensurable goals whilst leveraging athletes’ skills and competencies (e.g. problem solving, decision-making, communicating, teamwork and leadership) as means to help their integration in education, training and open labour market. GOAL creates a gamified online dual career educational programme for supporting dual careers of athletes using massive open online learning environments and games for sports, entrepreneurship and recreational activities. A set of interactive ICT-based tools will be offered to active and non-active athletes for acquiring skills and competencies necessary to consciously discover, plan and determine their future career goals once they complete their competitive sports career. Such skills are critical in developing athlete’s continuous professional and life career development including efforts of coping with transition and change both as individual personalities being part of a wider community as well as professionals that will be following a career after sports competition, and thereby prepar ing them for a new job. The project will effectively start dual careers embracing awareness of athletes to balance sport training and education and, at a later stage, sport training and employment. Psychological support through e-mentoring and e-coaching as part of supporting services will be provided, aimed at helping athletes to overcome transitions in their careers inside and outside of sports. The project’s outcomes will be implement ed and evaluated in Greece, UK, Cyprus, Poland and Belgium. GOAL innovates by introducing games and gamification dual careers curriculum for helping athletes to conceptualise, plan and cope with transition to education and open labour market.
Objectives
- To design and develop digital content packaged in serious games and gamified digital interfaces to support dual career of athletes (active and former athletes
- Supporting training programmes for popular organised sports in Europe (i.e. basketball, football, futsal), amplifying participatory approaches among geographically dispersed athletes whilst amalgamating socio-cultural issues congruent to the 2008 EU physical activity guidelines.
- Supporting and scaffolding athlete’s knowledge, entrepreneurial skills and competencies following a community-based architecture that introduces a gamified educational programme, for adult life-long education and training, integrated and accessed through a European Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) embracing a de-centralised model of diversity, open access, equity and quality. The MOOC will become a collaborative community of practice aiming to contribute to the perceived difficulty of creating and testing educational content as reported in the EU guidelines on Dual Careers.
- To implement a series of training activities for supporting athletes’ dual careers via introducing games and gamified interfaces for instructional design, development of personal capacities that are critical in developing the athletes both as individual personalities (such as teamwork, goal setting, coaching) as well as professionals that will be following a career after sports competition.
- To provide supporting services such as distant psychological support and e-mentoring through the specialist staff and community of practice for helping athletes to cope with forthcoming career transitions and be equipped with contingency plans escalating effective strategies.
