PregChili

Name: PregChilLi - Parents for Parents: adult education online courses around pregnancy, childbirth and life with a newborn

Project financed by: Erasmus+ KA210-ADU - Small-scale partnerships in adult education

Project period: 2.5.2022. - 2.11.2023.

Reference number: 2021-2-DE02-KA210-ADU-000048970

Project budget: 60.000 EUR

Partners

Mother Hood (Germany) – project lead
Roda - Roditelji u akciji (Croatia)

Background

"If only I had known!" We dream of a world in which parents of newborns, especially first time mothers, do not say that phrase anymore. We want them to feel they had all the information they needed and known about all the available options and how to navigate them.
Currently available pregnancy courses are taught from a clinical perspective, without offering important adult-learning methodologies which add to their success. From our experiences working with parents in Germany and Croatia, those courses lack to address important issues: for parents, the labour and delivery ward, and life with a newborn are like "black boxes" that you enter without knowing what to expect and many parents are unaware of all their options. Medical professionals teaching hospital-based courses tend to concentrate on clinical routines and skip over many topics that are imporatnt to parents-to-be. Peer to peer based learning with a robust basis in adult education methodologies has been
proven effective and important to new parents - Roda has successfully developed eCourses, running since March 2020, with excellent evaluations. 

Making use of the experience of two grassroots-parental maternity care advocacy organizations, the eCourses will be tailored to the parents' real needs and empower them to navigate the national care system. The courses will contribute to health equity, as they will be inclusive: video subtitles allowing a basic automatic translation into other languages, thus making the eCourses available for parents from other language backgrounds and refugees, giving important insights into the care systems for non-natives. Texts will be suitable for text-to-language tools for visually impaired persons. The free online format will give access to this information to all interested parents-to-be in Germany and to the revised versions in
Croatia.
The peer-to-peer concept grounded in online adult learning methodologies will allow for a paradigm shift, and introduce adult learners from broad geographies and socio-economic backgrounds to online learning. Life with a new born is often hard on new parents because the physical strain meets major bodily changes, social changes, economic changes, differing role expectations and dysfunctional communication between the partners. All of these issues, and many more, will be addressed in the eCourse and are therefore a valuable tool towards health competency, health equity and accessibility. We strongly believe that knowledge is prevention - prevention of both physical as well as mental health of expecting and new parents.

Objectives

The aim of the project is to use adult education to improve health competency, physical and mental health and more informed decision making in parents and parents-to-be by creating peer-to-peer online adult education courses, including the underlying technical platform, for the maternity care context and life with a newborn. 
Current adult education courses in the fields of prepration for childbirth, postpartum and life with a newborn do not cover issues that matter to the lived experiences of parents. At the same time, parents-to-be are very motivated to learn about the life change pregnancy and childbirth bring with them, and their motivation can be channeled into an adult-learning
opportunity in an online environment. 

Implementation Activities

The project will involve one training activity for staff and senior volunteers of the leading organisation where Roda's staff will:

• introduce participants with the tool (Rise) they used in their online courses creation, followed with hands-on mentorship during the creation of the German course
• share tips & tricks for making short, useful videos that can be used in online courses, as well as tips&tricks for efficient team collaboration on course creation.

The project will have two main outputs:

1. New online platform for e-learning in German, for Mother Hood organization

2. Reconstructed online platform for e-learning in Croatian, for RODA, with two main online courses adapted for people with impaired hearing 

The project will also include dissemination event in Germany, two social media campaigns, one in each partner's country and articles that introduces wider audience to our e-learning platforms.

Results

• 1 e-learning management system (platform where the courses are held) for the German and Croatian language courses
• 1 website for e-learning content (German)
• 1 updated website for e-learning content (Croatian)
• 2 antenatal e-courses in German
• 2 updated antenatal e-courses in Croatian

Disclaimer: This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.