Motivation

​Every sixth person in the EU has a disability, making it difficult for them to fully participate in society and the economy. It is estimated that there are 80 million people in this group. More than 70% are forced to live/survive on the poverty line due to their limited access to employment. (EU Labour Force Research, 2010). In 2015, the European Federation of the Deaf published a report titled "Hearing Loss: Statistics", which states that 50 million people in Europe are deaf. When the figures related to hearing-impaired employment in Europe are examined, it is a fact that more than 50percent of them are unemployed, and the vast majority of those who can find jobs have to work in low-skilled and low-wage jobs. Jobs

Our project has been designed in partnership with organizations from Germany, Portugal, Turkey and Finland. We aim to do our part to remove these barriers for hearing-impaired individuals who want to become cooks/chefs, who have received vocational training in the field of vegan cooking or who work professionally, but also want to improve their skills or improve their professional skills.

There are various issues related to the vocational training of hearing-impaired people, whose mother tongue is sign language. The main reasons for this are the curricula that are not suitable for them, the low number of teachers who speak sign language, and the educational materials that are not developed in sign language. The vocational training of hearing-impaired people, who are already full of problems, has almost completely stopped during the pandemic process. No significant study has been conducted on the distance education of our target audience. This problem we have expressed is the same not only in our country, but also in the countries of our partners, in Europe and in the world in general. 

Solutions for vocational education and distance learning of the hearing impaired have taken place in the literature. E-learning systems include short learning modules to best meet the needs of hearing-impaired students, the content of the training includes as little text as possible and is presented in a visual format (pictures, subtitled videos, etc.) and provides an automated evaluation system (Pappas et al., 2018). The specific needs of deaf learners in an e-learning environment include: bilingual knowledge (text and sign language), interactive and exploratory learning, high-level visualization, learning in peer groups through video conferencing (Drigas & Kouremenos, Kouremenos & Vrettaros, 2005).

Our project will offer this service completely free of charge and online to anyone who wants to improve themselves in the vegan kitchen field. These are the intentions and objectives we have in our minds.

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