Context and background: Self-directed learning is a process in which the individual learner takes the initiative, with the support of others to diagnose their learning needs, formulate learning goals, identify resources for learning (including the people that can support them in the process), select and implement learning strategies and evaluate learning outcomes. This learner-directed approach is more and more common in non-formal and formal settings but educators in both work on their own islands. This training course brought actors of both educationals setting together to learn from each other, exchange and develop workshops together that can be used both in formal and non-formal educational and learning settings. The participated educators were empowered to start using SDL as an approach in their own educational setting and to develop themselves further as SDL-practioners. The objectives of this course were: to offer educators in both formal and non-formal contexts the safe and supportive non-formal and self-directed learning environment to: - experience and explore the concept of self-directed learning as a learner - discover what it means to support and/or design self-directed learning processes as an educator both in non-formal and formal settings - design and try out together with other participants an in the training course designed and developed self-directed learning activity (workshop) in a formal and/or non-formal context, to asses the outcomes, evaluate the process and learn from it for further application in their own educational context of the individual participants - exchange about the opportunties and challenges there are in the specific educational context of each participant to implement self-directed learning in some degree - develop (the beginning of) a practical manual of how to implement self-directed learning in the educational context of the indidvidual participants - spread the fire about self-directed learning in the partner organisations and schools where the educators work and continue to learn and grow as a practioner of self-directed learning together with others (from within and outside of this training course) What? A training course for educators to find out how to implement self-directed learning processes in non-formal and formal learning contexts by experiencing SDL as a learner, look at SDL as a supporter of learning and practise with a during the training developed self-directed learning activity as a start of developing an own manual and practise for implementing SDL in the own educational context. When? 31 August (arrival and intro) till 6 September (departure) 2014 Where? Oasecentrum Dilbeek For who? Educators who support learning processes in their professional or volunteer activities, both in non-formal and formal educational contexts. 26 participants and 2 trainers from 9 countries Approach: a self-directed learning approach which means that the participants will be self-directed learners themselves, responsible for all steps of the self-directed learning process. Activities: for details please see the detailed program in annex Results: - the participants have experienced self-directed learning as a learner and have shared and reflected on this experience - the participants have discovered ways to support a self-directed learning process by designing a self-directed learning activity in small mixed (in terms of countries and formal and non-formal settings) groups and implementing it for the rest of the group. They received feedback from the participants, got a chance to reflect as a group and individually on their experience and take their learnings for their further practice with SDL. - the participants shared the logical framework and the outlines of the designed workshops with each other and the majority of the participants have implemented either their own or one of the other workshops again. This is the case for the Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, Greek and Irish participants and the Belgian and Swedish participants set up a joint training course together during the training for which they used SDL as the approach. Impact: The educators who participated are able to implement the during the training developed self-directed learning activities in their own educational contexts and the majority of them actually did just that. All the participants are aware of both the opportunities and the limits of implementing SDL in their educational context and have spread the fire about self-directed learning and its benefits in their own environment by implementing the designed workshops again in their own educational contexts. The organisers facilitated a ning-platform but it did not really work well after the training because of being an extra thing to log in so 3 months after the training all activity switched to the training fb-group that still exists and is occasionally active till this day ( 7/5/2016).