www.unitbv.ro

21 January 2025

Transilvania University of Brașov has just successfully completed the European project “Innovative Teaching and Learning Paths for the Prevention of New Drug Abuse (INES)”. This project, conducted between 2021 and 2024, financed through the ERASMUS+ programme, aimed at developing an online educational platform, freely accessible to all teachers of Romania and around the world, in order to help prevent the use of new psychoactive substances (NPS) by young people.

In collaboration with five other educational institutions across Europe and an IT company of Brussels, Transilvania University of Brașov developed INES, an innovative digital platform which provides the teaching personnel with open-source educational tools. These resources are intended to support the NPS use prevention activities in schools, through interactive lessons and extracurricular activities.

The international partners of UNITBV within this project are: Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna (Italy) – project coordinator, the University of Porto (Portugal), the high-schools: João Gonçalves Zarco High-School of Matosinhos (Portugal), Gaetano Salvemini High-School of Bologna (Italy), Mircea Cristea Technical College of Brașov and Swingtree company of Brussels (Belgium).

INES, as a platform, offers a wide range of educational resources, including a European curriculum that supports the approach to the topic of NPS, open educational resources and courses intended for the teachers to plan and implement teaching/learning activities on the topic of NPS. A collaborative manual at European level is also available on the platform, with learning content, teaching strategies - all of them developed by representatives of the institutions involved in the INES project. 

One of the most innovative project results is the interactive educational game, developed along with the pupils at the three high schools involved in the project. This game allows pupils to learn in an interactive and engaging way about the risks associated with the use of NPS.

Moreover, the book “INES: An interdisciplinary and collaborative research-action experience to integrate the New Psychoactive Substances topic into upper secondary school curricula” is a project result as well. The book is issued under the Publishing House of Transilvania University of Brașov, shows the results of the experimental teaching activities within the project, as well as makes organisational, technical and didactic recommendations for their transfer into various local educational experiences. At the same time, it is available in ebook format on the platform of the Publishing House of Transilvania University and can be downloaded for free. 

For more information, please access the website of the project: https://ines.unibo.it