As 2016 begins, the EUMillennialsTOUR project goes live and it is ready to achieve a few of the relevant milestones of the project. The Consortium Partners worked strongly during the Autumn to achieve the first relevant objective: the launch of the e-learning course.
Meanwhile, a Steering Committee / Advisory Board of Experts for the project was elected and includes Ms. Gill Harvey of the School Tourism Forum, Mr. Oscar Boije of the Erasmus Student Network and Mr. Lars Lichtenberg of Regialog eV. The Steering Committee will play a relevant role in the project implementation, providing important feedback in monitoring and enhancing the project’s activities and outputs.
As essential ground-base activity for the project implementation, the Consortium’s initially focused on establishing a transnational character for the project. 128 stakeholders in 20 European countries were identified, including associations, universities and educational institutions, museums, visitor bureaus and other public entities, as well as private companies with interests in education, school group travel, textiles, creative arts, and cultural and industrial heritage.
Several organisations have joined the Consortium as Associated Partners: Regialog (Emden, Germany), Brake Tourismus und Marketing eV (Brake, Germany), the Focke Museum (Bremen, Germany), Arkwright Society (UK), the Erasmus Tourism Network (Belgium), and others are in the process to join. Project partners collected a number of good practices from diverse fields relevant to the project, forming the basis of e-learning modules.
As a result the EUMillennialsTOUR ultimate e-learning course is ready for launching and will be accessible to all stakeholders, associated partners and professionals active in the cultural heritage and tourism market sector. The course – free of charge – will allow for knowledge sharing and training to help public and private stakeholders in charge of the management and of the promotion of cultural heritage sites as well as tourism destination managers to strengthen their current capacities and ultimately attract more young visitors.
In parallel, the Consortium is strongly working on the design of tourism product. On top of that, research on the educational/school group tourism market is currently under way aiming to estimate the size and scope of the market and to identify the the motivations, needs and importance of educational/school group tourism.
Therefore, the Consortium is gathering and analysing information from educators, students and organisations that support and service educational/school groups.This will enable us to confirm the design – currently under way – of the pilot trip itineraries. These will involve 8 classes (120 students, 16 teachers) travelling to 4 different countries: Italy, UK, Germany and Belgium.
The main narrative logic of the trans-national tourism trips will be represented by the outstanding EU Industrial Heritage sites as living memories of our past, in particular in the textile sector. To stimulate local communities’ participation in the provision of additional tourism and re-creational services, workshops will be shortly organised and celebrated in the 4 countries hosting the pilot trips, i.e. Italy, UK, Germany and Belgium.