The proposed project has a clear added value at a European level for the following reasons:
- STAYinBowling project has partners in 2 European countries. STAYinBowling’s geographical coverage, therefore, is sufficient to ensure that our project has representation from diverse European regions. This allows for an appropriate cultural mix, and the identification of cross-cultural differences in the DC support. Secondly, there is also a cultural and religious mix in our project partners (e.g., Christian Orthodox, Protestant, Christian Catholic) and this will further allow us to recognize, if this cultural and religious mix has an influence on the use of computer-based approaches on teaching issues relevant to substance use. Our research plan (questionnaires and focus group interviews) during the evaluation of the digital courses and services will give us indicators about the role of religious beliefs in supporting DC in the identified target groups.
- STAYinBowling partners maintain extensive networks across Europe with athletic associations and Higher Educational Institutions -HEIs- (in different levels of sports and in our target groups), namely:
- Bowling Coaches: TEN PIN Club and Malta Ten Pin Bowling Association have very close connections to many bowling coaches in Greece and Malta, and have many bowling coaches as their members and have several communications with several seasoned bowling athletes.
- New athletes: Both TEN PIN Club and Malta Ten Pin Bowling Association have direct access to many members as both of them are the main association bowling clubs in their local communities, providing the possibility to play bowling to anyone interested.
STAYinBowling has as main goal to use state-of-art technology to initiate the first online community of practice for the bowling game. Central to the design and management plan of STAYinBowling is the need to involve countries beyond our consortium in the online community of practice, and this will also be one of the key success indicators of the project. As already mentioned, our collaborative partnership has partners that are members of pan-European that will help our project in realizing this goal.
Some of the partners of project STAYinBowling are currently involved in several other European-funded projects relevant to DC. Practically, this means that we already have active consortia with partners in countries different than the ones already covered by STAYinBowling. As part of STAYinBowling’s dissemination activities, we will be actively using our existing consortia to further disseminate STAYinBowling’s outputs beyond the geographical reach of our consortium.
As part of project’s dissemination activities, we have already identified key conferences, conventions, and policy-meetings with an international/pan-European coverage where we would like to present and disseminate the project’s outputs. AUTh is organizing every second year the International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication, Technologies and Learning (http://www.imcl-conference.org/). In the context of this conference is organizing the special session “DiTeS: Digital Technology in Sports”. STAYinBowling partners (e.g., AUTh) already maintain good relationships with the organizing bodies of other events (such as the International Conference on Technology and Innovation in Sports, Health and Wellbeing, http://www.tishw.ws) and have been actively involved in them in the past either by presenting projects’ results or by organizing the events.
Our digital media strategy (part of Dissemination/WP4) has a clear target to utilize social media to publicize and disseminate project’s concept, key outputs, and information about participating in our communities of practice to relevant stakeholders across Europe and beyond our consortium’s geographical coverage.
The STAYinBowling project builds on the principle that bowling is a game really enjoyable able to bring together many people of different ages and different backgrounds. The project not only support the EC Guideline for promotion of education in and through sport with the MOOCs, but effectively works towards the goal of Encouraging Healthy Lifestyle for all. There is a clear need of European cooperation for the following reasons:
- The STAYinBowling project fills an identified gap and a direct need for developing distance learning programmes and tools that combine educational content with a range of flexible forms of education delivery, in this case comprising multimedia blended content with personalised feedback provision to students. The project provides an online virtual learning environment where educational content for skill development related to the proposed technique of playing bowling. STAYinBowling distance learning environment will provide student with flexibility in terms of the timing and location of their physical activity, sporting and academic activities. Moreover, several of the new athletes of bowling will participate in the community to find resources. This will enhance the feeling of belonging to a community that shares similar experiences, problems and needs.
- Moreover, the online educational content and the created community of practice that will dually support the development of the skill related to the proposed technique of playing bowling will be co-developed and shared by the participating EU educational and sports organisations (as proposed in Guideline 12 ) and subsequently made available to European DC/sports stakeholders across Europe, avoiding duplication of efforts that would unavoidably occur if the initiative is taken at a national level in different countries. The co-creation process is also advantageous in mitigating risks and minimising costs for all participating organisations, while maximising the future value of the developed platform for further development of educational content.
The STAYinBowling project will essentially develop a network of bowling athletes by nurturing an online Community of Practice among everyone who are interested. The European character of this network will be supported by the project consortium members and will be further extended through their connections with physical education and sports’ stakeholders across Europe. Most importantly, support received from the community will be fully integrated in the sport, educational, vocational and lifestyle systems of the teachers rather than remaining isolated outside the physical activity/sport context. The online platform that will host this virtual community of practice will provide a collaborative space for exchange of expertise and knowledge, for receiving and offering advice among peers, for disseminating news and information on policies, benefits, opportunities and programmes that target bowling athletes around Europe (in support of Action Guideline 32 ). Active participation in this European community of practice will inspire self-confidence to teachers, spread and facilitate adoption of good practices in a domain that frequently receives inadequate attention from governmental and non-governmental organisations.
