At the beginning of 2006, October, it was the kick-off meeting of the “Learning for Plastics” project into the European Comission Leonardo's Program, in Brussels (
http://www.vkc.be/index2.php?page=leonardo_ENG&lang=ENG).
One the participants in this project is ASCAMM, represented, in the meeting, by Ramon Costa, Director of Training Services and José Bas, Engineer of Research & Development Area.
The project “Learning for Plastics” aims at developing a fully integrated learning package for persons with basic knowledge about extrusion and injection moulding.
This package should enable the target audience to have full and easy access to up-to-date technical information about extrusion and injection moulding.
The current European plastics industry is confronted with an increasing competition, mainly from the upcoming Asian countries. Competition is especially harsh on the production of plastic products with a simple production process. In order to survive, the European plastics industry must improve its knowledge and share his know how on a European level and focus on the production of more complex products.
Therefore the workers and future workers in this industry must increase their knowledge about the techniques, methods and materials concerning extrusion and injection moulding. Nowadays the available know how is spread over European institutions.
Therefore the partners in this project consortium, all outstanding professional knowledge centers on plastics technology, will make an inventory of the available knowledge, consolidate the outcome and make this knowledge available through e-learning materials.
The course will integrate the available state of the art scientific knowledge of the universities and the working knowledge of the companies.
In order to make the course easy accessible, we will make use of ICT techniques such as animations, simulations, movies, …
The materials will be programmed in Flash. Moreover, we will use practical examples, best practices,… to make the assimilation process as easy as possible.
The materials will be available in the languages of the project partners, i.e. Dutch, Spanish, German and French.
The end users of the e-learning materials are experienced technicians and operators in the plastics industry, high school and university students and people that have completed basic training on extrusion and injection moulding.
We will provide the e-learning materials to high schools, technical universities, training institutions and individual companies. All the project partners themselves will also use the materials in their trainings and education. In order to maintain the e-learning materials, we will develop a European platform that guarantees the sustainability of the cooperation.
Similar institutions in other European countries will be actively stimulated to join this platform.During two years all the participants of the project (technology centers, enterprise associations and universities will work together to comply this objective.
