Successful previous LA and EU HE cooperation revealed differences between HESystems, academic recognition principles and practices. A long path is still ahead in terms of streamlined mobility recognition with fair credit transfer and grade conversion. Most LA countries have no credit system nationally applying to HEIs and the majority has regulations to frame mobility abroad, but handles recognition on individual basis and equivalence without grading is very common, negatively impacting students. RecMat joins partners from AR, BR and EU with the core aim of contributing to promote mobility between EU and LA, by reducing barriers related to academic recognition and building LA HEIs capacity to implement a fairer recognition process. Partners will work at two levels, linking the policy and practical dimensions behind academic recognition. Unlike previous initiatives, RecMat targets not only International Officers, but teachers who are the main decision makers in LA HEIs in what recognition is concerned, who are distant from Bologna rationale and usually show high resistance to recognition. This will be achieved by involving teachers in blended-training and in piloting concrete case studies, to evidence practical successful processes. Through a peer-to-peer approach, RecMat will raise teachers’ awareness about the importance of ensuring full recognition and stimulating fair grade conversion. RecMat activities will capacitate HEIs to formally frame recognition and build a linkage with IT teams by providing training to IT staff and enabling LA HEIs to outline concrete technical solutions to ease recognition. Through the organisation of public (inter-)national events and policy forums, RecMat will bring the topic to wide discussion, encouraging a high number of HEIs to adopt similar processes and sharing with them the project's innovative outcomes (MOOC, Digital Compendium and Conclusions Paper) towards the improvement and transparency of academic recognition processes.

The rise of a low-carbon society, compatible with economic growth and environmental sustainability, is pending on a number of technological evolutions and breakthroughs. In that line, the role played by wind energy is deemed to increase further in the next decades. The development of performant wind farms is pending upon the performance of each turbine composing the wind farm, and on the optimal harvesting of the local wind resources. A wind park performance is nowadays predicted assuming standard profiles of mean incoming velocity, turbulence intensities and scales, etc. corresponding to standard terrain topographies and atmospheric conditions. One main limitation of such standards is that the assumed flow and turbulence properties were established to fit databases gathered on a limited number of locations, which are by definition not representative of the quite various terrain configurations nor local micro-meteorological situations that can be met in practice. This is a concern for complex terrains and is furthermore hampering the implementation of wind turbines in urban environments, which constitutes nevertheless an important component of future environmentally-friendly Smart Cities thanks to the favorable local flow accelerations, pressure build-up, canyon effects, etc. offered by an urban canopy. The ambition of this multi-disciplinary training platform is the development and application of advanced meso/microscale atmospheric models and the assessment of the impact of real terrain and local atmospheric effects on the predicted aerodynamic performance, structural dynamics and noise emissions. Obviously, human factors become a critical issue when considering implementing wind turbines in densely populated urban environments. The inter-dependencies between those factors (visual vs. acoustic effects, age or occupation, etc.), which complicate further the analysis of the motivations for a community to endorse or reject a new project, will be addressed as well.

The changes in educational paradigms and development of ICT are promoting the modernization of universities and the establishment of open and flexible study programs, freeing academic boundaries.Quality, accessibility and innovation are concepts that are driving the changes of virtual higher education. ACAI-LA Universities Network undertake the challenge of modernizing and internationalizing higher education, and contributing to development and social cohesion in Latin America, with an academic offer in pursuit of excellence, equitable and innovative.This academic offer will be available in the ACAI-LA Virtual Campus with accessible:- Life long learning program, MOOC.- Master for training of trainers, MOOC, certified by the consortium universities.This university campus will integrate online services for: support to students, support to graduates and job placement, and guidance to teachers in methodologies and innovative educational techniques.The curricula will:- Be open and flexible.- Form its students with ICT skills required by the labour market.- Include educational materials and laboratories, accessible to social groups with learning difficulties because of economic, ethnicity, gender or disabilities reasons.- Be available in: English, Spanish, Mayan and / or African descent languages.A sustainable business model will be supported for capacity building in:- Young graduates.- Teachers, who create innovative educational, quality and accessible resources.This scientific and educational cooperation network shows the diversity in Latin America. The ACAI-LA Network consists of three European universities and eight Latin American, four of which are located in less developed countries of Central America and the others are from South America. This condition will improve the impact, dissemination and exploitation of project results, publications and open educational materials.

By developing this project, the consortium aims to contribute for the resolution of several challenges, such as unemployment among young graduates; difficulties to attract private funds to research; the academics' needs for constant pedagogical skills update; difficulties to promote the transference of knowledge; the difficulty to attract students from social disadvantaged classes and mantain them; the need to promote entrepreneur minds to contribute to decrease economic and social crisis; the use of crowdsourcing as a tool to create a network; the difficulty of attracting users from different regions and finally, the need to improve students' career guidance.In order to achieve the purposed goals, were defined three core activities: the platform development, where different stakeholders will be connected; the platform room to promote its use; and the entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing and employability stakeholders' training to help them to improve these skills and create opportunities through the use of the platform.

By initiating a Latin American-European cooperation on innovation and entrepreneurship, the LISTO project adresses the LA universities' need to keep developing their capacities in connecting with the wider economic and social environment. The project has identified three target areas. 1.) University-industry relations; 2.) Teachings entrepreneurship skills; 3.) entrepreneurial universities. LISTO will establish an exchange of methods for matching researchers with industry R&D staff (AIMday), develop an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship skills module and train teachers in delivering an international classroom, and work on strategies for fostering an entrepreneurial spirit and innovation governance. There will be an open access ebook (in English, Spanish and Portuguese) summarizing the results and the teaching methods.