Quality teaching has become an issue of importance, but learning to teach in higher education too often a difficult undertaking. A Communication from the Commission on a Renewed Agenda for Higher Education (2017) mentions the disturbing fact that “too many higher education teachers have received little or no pedagogical training”. This is a matter of particular concern for teachers and learners of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) in VET and higher education institutions that do not lead to degrees in languages, where language skills are expected to enhance mobility and employability. Since LSP is in direct relationship with the world of work, it is assumed to play a key role to create multilingual and mobile citizens. The importance of language skills for the labour market is emphasized in different EU documents such as Multilingualism: An Asset for Europe and a Shared Commitment (European Commission, 2008) or The European Strategy for Multilingualism (2008) which promote mobility of the labour force in the Single Market, employability and growth in Europe.The objective of this project is to provide students and teachers of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) with a multilingual online course which allows them to acquire the competences needed for a successful implementation of teaching languages in a specific context. The developed online course targets future and early career teachers which may not have received sufficient education in LSP teaching given the prevalent gaps in LSP teacher training in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The aim is to develop an online course which will be made available to the LSP community as an Open Educational Resource (OER). The OER solution will be implemented as self-directed course content on a learning management system (LMS). The LMS will allow interested parties to self-enrol and study the course content in its entirety or those sections which are deemed of special interest. The course content will be available in all languages of the strategic partnership consortium, namely in Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Slovenian and Turkish. It will be available online but can also be downloaded and integrated into existing institutional LMS systems.The strategic partnership consortium consists of ten member institutions out of which nine are directly involved as teachers of languages for specific purposes (LSP). The project will involve a number of activities which will lead to a multilingual online LSP teacher training course as an Open Educational Resource (OER). Firstly, existing LSP teacher education and development programmes are analysed and synthesised. An online teaching methodology will be defined and multilingual course content for LSP teacher education and development will be created. An open online course for new LSP teacher education development will be created and piloted, and a large-scale trialling will take place involving a high number of LSP students and practitioners. The use of learning analytics (LA), statistical tools and machine learning algorithms will allow the consortium to identify typical learning itineraries which will allow partners to develop different learning pathways as a guideline for interested users.The project activities include a number of different methods, reaching from desktop research and analyses and qualitative discourse analyses of feedback given to highly innovative quantitative methods including supervised and unsupervised machine learning and computerised analytics.Upon completion of the project, LSP students, practitioners and stakeholders can use a multilingual online course to acquire relevant competences for LSP teaching. The course will guide interested parties through the developed contents by means of individual learning pathways. The course will also be available as on Open Educational Resource (OER) for download and integration into institutional learning management systems (LMS).The expected impact is to develop partnerships aimed at providing and promoting knowledge and skills for high quality teaching and learning of LSP in VET and in higher education. LSP institutions and individual practitioners will be able to use both the developed LSP teacher training online course and make use of all material disseminated throughout the project.This will lead to longer-term benefits such as a more unified way of learning and teaching languages for specific purposes (LSP), increased intercultural awareness, innovative digital learning activities allowing for individual progression, better developed skills in LSP language teaching and in using innovative digital learning tools, shared experience and material and, in general, positive changes in the attitude towards LSP learning and teaching.

Decarbonizing the production and consumption of products and materials play a critical role in reaching ambitious climate targets. As a result, a new circular economic system that aims to reduce primary material use (in addition to energy efficiency and fuel shifts) can address both Greenhous Gas emissions (GHG)s and increase resource efficiency. However, current GHG mitigation models and scenarios that inform climate policymakers do not generally include circular economy (CE) options. They also do not cover the possible synergies of the CE with other societal goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), nor the challenges involved in rearranging value chains and consumer behaviour. CIRCOMOD addresses these challenges by developing a new generation of advanced models and scenarios that will assess how CE can reduce future GHGs and material use. The project brings together a unique consortium of leading research teams from different disciplines, including industrial ecology and material flow modelling, process-oriented integrated assessment modelling, and macro-economic modelling. It aims for a breakthrough in integrating CE and GHG mitigation assessments by developing an analytical framework that maps circular economy strategies to existing influential climate scenarios; by providing robust and timely CE data in an open repository; and, by improving the representation of the CE in leading models used by European and global institutions, while strengthening links between the models. These key scientific breakthroughs enable robust scientific assessments in collaboration with stakeholders across policy and industry. It will provide timely input to international assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Resource Panel (IRP). CIRCOMOD will provide actionable insights into the circular economy and help address one of the largest challenges of the coming decades.

GREENE addresses one of the Europe’s Grand Societal Challenges, aligned with the European Green Deal and the recently released Green Deal Industrial Plan for the Net-Zero Age, which alongside the Circular Economy Action Plan, sets the framework for the transformation of the EU’s industry. Rare-earth-element (REE) permanent magnets based on Nd–Fe–B are vital for use in electric vehicles and wind turbines, making then central to Europe’s green-energy future. These magnets have outstanding properties, but they are not without their weaknesses. There is, of course, the well-known dependence on imports from China, on which Europe is presently totally dependent. However, here, in line with the scope of the Resilient valu chains 2023 call, GREENE will focous on a redesign of Nd-Fe-B magnets as an advanced material where the Nd in the grain boundary is replaced. At the same time, we will address the problem of translating the under-used intrinsic properties of the hard-magnetic Nd2Fe14B phase into better extrinsic properties of the magnet. And, since the process will apply equally well to fresh or recycled feedstocks, we will also be impacting on the problem of supply dependence.

REWIND aims at developing critical technologies for dismantling end-of-life (EoL) wind turbine blades (WTB) (evaluation, advanced cutting, etc.) and implementing new methodologies for composites repurposing and recycling (catalytic pyrolysis and solvolysis) to increase the circularity of WTB, increasing the industrial applications of the EoL composites, and avoiding the current landfilling or incineration. The main composition of the composite waste is expected to be epoxy resin/carbon fibre (CF), epoxy resin/glass fibre (GF) and polyester resin/GF. The new methodologies will address the following challenges: 1) Study and development of suitable disassembly, quality inspection and characterisation of the composite waste, to be able to understand composite waste properties. As a result, it will be possible to decide if composite parts from EoL products should be repurposed or recycled depending on their value. 2) Show potential high-value applications for composite end-of-life: repurposing will be demonstrated through manufacturing 2 demonstrators (for construction and automotive sector). This will be done by matching specified requirements with dismantled materials using software and hardware tools to facilitate the fragmentation processes. 3) New innovative pyrolysis and solvolysis methods for recycling will be developed and tested to significantly reduce the processing temperature and time for those parts that cannot be used in repurposing. This will allow to save energy, and together with the post-treatments, improving the quality of the materials recovered (e.g., weaved fibres, sized fibres, recycled polyester resin, recycled epoxy resin and epoxy vitrimer resins based on recycled monomers). Secondary raw materials obtained will be used to manufacture 2 demonstrators for wind energy sector: a small wind blade root section and composites patches for blades repairing. REWIND technologies should be scalable to process high volumes of waste in the near future.

During the past few years many projects and initiatives were undertaken deploying and testing Automated Vehicles (AVs) for public transportation and logistics. However in spite of their ambition, all of these projects stayed on the level of elaborated experimentation and never reached the level of a large-scale commercial deployment of transport services. The reasons for this are many, the most important being the lack of economically viable and commercially realistic models, the lack of scalability of the business and operating models, and the lack of user oriented services required for large end-user adoption of the solutions. The ULTIMO project will create the very first economically feasible and sustainable integration of AVs for MaaS public transportation and LaaS urban goods transportation. ULTIMO aims to deploy in three sites in Europe 15 or more multi-vendor SAE L4 AVs per site. A user centric holistic approach, applied throughout the project, will ensure that all elements in a cross-sector business environment are incorporated to deliver large-scale on-demand, door-to-door, well-accepted, shared, seamless-integrated and economically viable CCAM services. We target the operation without safety driver on-board, in a fully automated and mission management mode with the support of innovative user centric passenger services. ULTIMO’s innovative transportation models are designed for a long-term sustainable impact on automated transportation in Europe, around the globe and on society. The composition of the consortium ensures the interoperability between multiple stakeholders by making adoption of new technology at minimum costs and maximum safety. The integration of the ongoing experiments of previous AV-demonstrator projects ensures highest possible technical and societal impacts from the very beginning of the project, as well as during the project lifetime and even long after its completion.