Education+digital?!

There is a consensus in education policy that people need digital skills in order to be able to cope with the demands of this rapidly changing every day life and working environment and to be able to reflexively cope with this digital change and in some cases even shape it. In all European countries and at the level of the European Union (European Commission, 2014), the development of appropriate professional competencies as well as the development of basic digital competencies for all citizens is therefore on the education policy agenda. Adult education institutions are particularly challenged here. They have always focused not only on the preparation for certain demands of occupation and work, but in particular on the formation of a holistic personality who lives a successful life in a reflexive, self-determined and responsible way. Thus oriented, they are necessarily connected to a mediatized and increasingly digitized world of life and work. They continue to develop their offerings in terms of content and methodology and today - at different levels of implementation - use media and digital formats for competence assessment, knowledge transfer, learning process support and educational counselling. They are supported by the adult education associations, with national initiatives and offers or also with Europe-wide impulses, offers and aids on EPALE. Without questioning the importance of these supporting activities for the development of the vocational pedagogical competence of employees in adult education institutions, some challenges and questions remain on the agenda of each adult education institution. These concern all dimensions of adult education work, starting with target-group-specific addressing and the suitability of digital formats for specific participants through to the ethical and legal framing of teaching and learning. The European area of lifelong learning, with its cultural and organisational diversity, offers a very appropriate forum for discussion and exchange of ideas, methods and practices of digital education and integration of digital media into teaching/learning processes.This project of a strategic partnership in adult education with seven institutions from the eight European countries Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, and Poland focuses on the exchange of good practice. The primary objective of this project is to enable the exchange of ideas, methods and practices of digital education in a transnational network and thus strengthen their reflective professionalism. This process of exchange, critical discussion and reflection of existing approaches and practices will be thematically structured, recorded and disseminated in its main discussions and outcomes.The impact can thus be described as the increase in experience and learning of the organisations and their pedagogical staff, which is reflected as far as possible in innovation in the institutions. In this context, innovation means the reflexive digitisation of educational organisations and educational offers in order to take older people or target groups with an unfavourable educational biography into the digital age.