“Illiteracy, defined as the total inability to read and write, has now been almost completely eradicated in EU, the phenomenon of functional illiteracy is becoming increasingly serious.” EU Parliament’s report on illiteracy & social exclusion-2002 Functional illiteracy is reading, writing and calculation skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level”. Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or write simple sentences in any language. According to a recent study from OECD, it is concerning about 80 Mio people from 15 to 65 in EU. A survey from the European Labour Force (2011) states that there were across EU 73 Mio low educated adults. Amongst the measures recommended to reduce functional illiteracy, the implementation of innovative trainings remains one of the best options. ICT based trainings are a suitable solution and also will participate to reduce the digital gap. The Music Is My Radar project aims to develop a distance learning training in order to improve basic and transversal skills for functional illiterate persons, aged between 15 and 65 years old, unemployed or employees in a company. The main objectives of the project are: - Developing basic skills & transversal skills - Promoting innovative practices in education using distance learning tools This training could be added to existing vocational or professional training and focus on music and through this framework use music to convey the basic and transversal skills needed to access to vocational training and/or employment. This training include 5 modules: 1/ Reading and writing 2/ Calculation 3/ Digital skills 4/ Entrepreneurship 5/ English language We chose this thematic of music for the following reasons: - Most of the functional illiterate persons went to school or has been doing a training. For most of them, learning is related to a failure. We think it is important to create a learning environment very different from what they experienced before in order to motivate them. Learners will not read novels, they will listen and read songs; they will not write a letter of intent, they will write songs. - Songs are frequently used during foreign language courses and they are very interesting from a pedagogical point of view. They are an opportunity to work on short texts, using popular expressions, and including repetitions. - Developing the same thematic during the whole training is also very important because it helps to link the modules together. - Music also will enable the access to both cultural and popular sensibilities and also will enable to implement a creative pedagogical approach. - Finally, the music thematic will enable the trainers’ creativity and will give the opportunity to create more fun pedagogical materials. The project partners are 4 training organisations from France, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia and 1 electronic music label from Germany. Project activities and methodology has been divided in 4 steps: STEP 1: Preparation - Creation of the detailed training program including pedagogical objectives and sub-modules and evaluation process - Selection and adaptation of the appropriate distance learning tools STEP 2: Creation - Creation of the pedagogical materials STEP 3: Implementation - Testing phase of the training on 100 learners, 100 tutors and 100 trainers - Evaluation of the testing phase STEP 4: Availability - Creation of the Music Is My Radar online project guide in order for other organisations to use or duplicate our work Expected tangible results of the project are: - An innovative and attractive pedagogical approach in order to improve basic and transversal skills of functional illiterates persons - A distance learning tool with all the pedagogical materials - Dissemination tools: project website, communication on social networks, monthly newsletter - A comprehensive online project guide including the full project methodology in order to be able to duplicate this project in another country and in another language, and also including all the evaluation reports of the national testing phases. Expected impacts of the project on our target group: - Increasing their interest for doing a training on basic and transversal skills - Improving significantly their basic and transversal skills - Facilitating their access to vocational training and/or their employability Expected impacts of the project on relevant stakeholders: - To foster training organizations and schools to use or duplicate this training method and tools - To foster job offices and financing organizations to communicate about this training method and develop trainings for jobseekers and employees on basic and transversal skills.