MOOC for Financial literacy

The project intends to intervene in an innovative way on a difficulty detected in the most recent PISA - OECD surveys : the need to spread economic and financial literacy especially among young people. The problem of economic and financial competences may affect people’s quality of life as in the course of our life we will have to face an increasing number of financial issues going from the mobile phone subscription to the financial investment in the course of study or the calculations for retirement. The common level of competence on issues such as banks, currencies, financial risk, the role of the state in the economy is quite low in the European countries, as opposed to what happens in China and the USA. Economic and financial literacy can nowadays be considered a real life skill, without which we can make choices that can affect our welfare and that of the others. The project takes its origin from these considerations that the network of Liceo Economico - Secondary Schools in Tuscany (21 schools) led forward by developing further analysis of the skills, also analyzing the current status for this issue, and of the interventions implemented so far. From these analyzes, there were several significant experiences of projects to spread economic and financial culture, projects that have made use of two elements rewarding in terms of achieving results: new technologies and peer education. New technologies are fundamental to attract young people and make them the protagonists of their education as well as peer education is crucial to make the message more direct and communication more immediate ( In the US for example, peer education has been widely introduced to increase financial literacy). Our project aims to bring together these two elements in order to deal with the need of spreading economic and financial literacy. The idea then is to get students build a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) with lessons that cover all the areas identified in the framework of the OECD surveys: Money and transactions, Planning and managing finances , Risk and return, Financial Environment. The framework also identifies the following processes: Identify financial information, Analyze information in a financial context, Evaluate financial issues, Apply knowledge in the financial area, in the school and working contexts as well as home and family, individual and social contexts. The students of the partner schools thanks to the other skills involved in the partnership, will follow a training path and realize, with the support of the teachers, the lessons, integrating various media (text, images, video games ... but also twitter, tag ..) at the end of the project we will get a tool that can be used either by all students of Italian Liceo Economico - Secondary Schools and by students from other countries for a basic economic literacy, increasingly necessary and vital to live in a complex environment like ours.