Digitized educational preventive program for children protection: development of the content and the role of an educator

Abstract

The goal of the article is to discuss the development of digitized educational preventive program for children protection which is being created during Erasmus+ Strategic partnership project (2019-1-TR01- KA204-077577). The project is implemented by partners from Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Spain, Turkey and coordinated by Kutahya Dumlupinar University (Turkey), however, the project has a wider scope then participating countries as developed digitized educational preventive program will be free of charge for any user from any country. Two objectives are formulated: to describe the process of the development of the content of educational preventive program and to highlight the challenges arising in implementation of the content using digital tools. Discussion of the first objective is based on a systematic literature review accompanied with narrative literature reviews in participating countries national languages, the discussion of the second objective is grounded on the experience of project’s national team and literature analysis. The project aimed to address maltreatment and violence against children as regardless of the efforts to protect children around the world, this remains a serious global challenge. The main focus of the development of the program was to create awareness about the importance of child protection in societies and to decrease the level of violence against children at national and international levels by designing and implementing digitized educational program. The program was developed in several interconnected stages. The process started from the need assessment which encompassed a systematic and narrative literature review in every project country. Literature reviews broadened knowledge of perceptions and believes about children maltreatment and violence across countries and served for project’s consortium as a basis for the content of educational preventive program, which included training material, training videos, guidebooks for users. During program development several challenges arose. First of all, the importance of educator role was recognized as essential in the successful program’s implementation as one of the crucial aspects in on line training is the communication with users, when “high-touch became more important than high-tech," i.e. high levels of accessibility is more important than high technology. Importance of encouraging users to stay involved and supporting them in the cases of technological and content-based challenges is crucial in the successful implementation of digitized educational preventive program. Secondly, the program’s sustainability issue hasn’t been solved as it is not decided yet who will be educators after the project’s end. Several possibilities are foreseen: to incorporate teaching in program to daily teaching activity workload when universities’ regulations allow to do so, to transfer the program to NGO working with violence against children, to make the content a self-supportive program which could operate without educator. Summarizing could be said that educational preventive programs based on solid theoretical background and designed by using digitised technologies could be a powerful tool in supporting vulnerable people and solving social problems. However, in preventive digitized programs the presence of educator is essential in reaching the target audience and keeping users involved during the process.