Timeless is a project targeting adult educators and older people as end users, who are involved in older adult education and/or would like to be. It is about learning and teaching English on the basis of collaboration and co-operation and transmitting intangible cultural heritage selected by older learners themselves and for older learners the end users of the project results. cf. Timeless will be timeless, EPALE

Slovenian Third Age University is a partner organisation in the Timeless Erasmus+ project, coordinated by Usak University, Turkey. Some of the project partners have been in co-operation before, some are new comers in the eyes of each other. Each partner  brought to the project its own culture(s); individual culture of its experts, their institutional culture, local and national culture, its culture of working and communicating…. When partners co-operate closely and have a strong expertise, they also have their own beliefs and values, their own attitude to time….and deadlines, their own type of commitment. A project coordinator has to be flexible as to put all disparate elements, institutions and people together. Most of the times a lot of planning and coordinating leads to good results, but sometimes individual interest and commitment of the partners ensure more spontaneity, more creativity and learning as well as better psychological” exchanges” as one of the participants in the frecent Timeless joint staff education emphasised in the final oral evaluation.

The joint staff educational programme lasted for three days, during which we all started feeling better, valued and enriched, taken out of the COVID birdcage. This may sound as a school assignment discourse, but not, in the case of Timeless it was real. Our horizons became broader, our feelings for one another were growing from the first day on. Partners shared a feeling of common achievement despite the on-line method, despite technical issues, despite …. During the final evaluation a colleague from Dublin said: “I am glad to have accepted your invitation. This made it possible for me to have gone beyond “the echo chamber” in which we have been living for months here in Dublin. I have met new strongly committed people with new thoughts and they made me think….”

Beatles worked in a garage, some meters from where I lived in Liverpool

What was so special about this training? The contents, the methods and...and the target group of end users. For many participants older people’s education was a new topic and a colleague from Bulgaria made a long and refreshing overview of the literature on the topic of older adult education and its most different and complex aspects. Collaborative and co-operative learning and teaching in older adult education were approached, the complex concept of culture was represented as an iceberg and educators should count with. Story maps and Kahoot are digital methods but useful and user friendly, definition of intangible cultural heritage became clearly “tangible” due to many local and national examples provided by the partners. Going back to Rumi and Sufism, to the swindling dervishes, the Amazon river, to rakija (plum brandy) and šobska salad, impressive Lithuanian festivals and over to the Beatles and through the eyes of the partners… was simply beautiful. It has been generally admitted that emotions in education are as important as cognition if not more. The joint staff training organised by Nikanor from Sofia proved it.

Partners of the Timeless project:

• Usak University is a young and active university founded in the west part of Turkey in 2006.Usak University is dedicated to the three broad purposes already mentioned-learning, research, and service: learning, on-campus and off-campus, to enhance the intellectual, cultural, social, and professional development of its students; research, both to extend the present limits of knowledge and to bring deeper insight, understanding, and usefulness to existing knowledge; and service, to apply knowledge and the outputs of research to the lives of people.
• Slovenian Third Age University, National Association for Education and Social Inclusion is a network of 52 third age universities in 51 localities with presently more than 21 000 students.
• Foundation for Innovation and Education “Zini” is a new non-governmental organization in Latvia. Organization aim is to promote the development of innovation and education by providing equal opportunities to all society through involvement in all projects and activities of Zini Foundation.
• DomSpain is an adult education organization specialised in the field of education and training, vocational studies, occupational, social and intercultural skills, languages and new technologies. 
• Nikanor Ltd was established in 2002 as a private company working in the field of recruitment, adults training and human resources management and development. The company offers vocational trainings, language courses and soft skill trainings. 
• EUROGEO is a European scientific society, a not-for-profit organisation, whose aims are to develop, support and promote policies designed to advance the status of Geography; establish and promote cross-border cooperation and represent nationally and internationally the views of its members.

Dušana Findeisen, currently head of the Institute for research and development of education at the Slovenian University of the Third Age, has worked in the field of education for older people and intergenerational learning and education for local development in former Yugoslavia, Slovenia and in many European countries since 1984. In 1986 she co-established the Slovenian University of the Third Age, where she has been president now for 15 years. She has been managing European projects for the last 25 years.