Project partners are higher education (HE) institutions aware how strongly digitalization affects the society, science and transfer of knowledge. While taking advantage of modern technologies at low environmental costs, DIGinLaw raises awareness of digital demands in HE in law and fosters the creation of digital literacy and digital competence that is needed in the law labour market, thereby fostering free circulation of highly educated workers; and creating open and inclusive society of legal knowledge and open access to scientific area dealing with effects of digitalization on law and legal education.The overall objective of the proposal is to advance utilization of digital technologies in the higher education in law. There are four specific objectives. Firstly, DIGinLaw aims to contribute to building and advancement of performance of online HE teaching in law. This specific objective is assured by providing a quality training on digital competences addressed to law professors and lecturers. Trainings would develop digital competences of HE law lecturers at three law faculties involved and result in an advanced level of performance of online HE teaching in law. Secondly, DIGinLaw aims to address the needs of labour market in the law profession by providing a high-quality training on digital competences to law students, as well as by their enrolment on high standard online courses. Gained transferable digital competences and skills correspond to EQF level 7 and 8 hereby addressing to the needs of the EU law profession labour market.Third specific objective of DIGinLaw is to create open online resources in law by the development of 12 high standard e-learning courses in law (MOOCs); which will be open and available not only to law students of the 3 law faculties involved but also available for students worldwide. Fourth specific objective of DIGinLaw is to foster open access research area addressing issues of digitalization of legal education and law by means of research activity (desk research, publication of written scientific papers and presentation at a scientific academic conference) in the area of digitalization of legal education and law, which will be delivered to the scientific community through an online streamed conference and an open access journal publication. The target groups are lecturers, students, academics, stakeholders at law labour market. On the lecturers side, in particular: 17 law lecturers involved in the project as they gain high-level training on digital competences; 60 professors and lecturers benefiting from the performance of the 12 MOOCs course model at the Raising awareness on digitalization of HE. On the students side, in particular: 30 law students of partner universities who will be enrolled in the summer school, law students of partner universities and other universities’ law students (including the ones with fewer opportunities) taking advantage of MOOCs created by the project, as well as 20 PhD students involved in PhD Book Club. Minimum 140 academics and other stakeholders benefiting from intellectual outcomes of the project devoted to the modern and underexplored issues of digitalization of law. The project indirectly targets also the stakeholders of law labour market that will benefit from the free circulation of T-shaped lawyers holding transferable EQF promoted digital competences and skills.Despite their different backgrounds, all of the partners are Humboldt-type universities affected by digitalization. They share a vision of future legal education leaning on the benefits of digital technology, providing HE based on advanced digital competences standards, and contributing to the European labour market through producing legal experts holding highly developed skills and competences matching EQF. Accordingly, this transnational project enhances European HE identity in all its diversity, providing for a high level of internationalization at a rather low cost. The project results in enhanced cooperation between legal specialists and experts in digital competences and IT. The project also boosts international cooperation between lecturers and students, using advanced digital technologies to teach, learn and explore law.

The EOSC-hub project creates the integration and management system of the future European Open Science Cloud that delivers a catalogue of services, software and data from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and major research e-infrastructures. This integration and management system (the Hub) builds on mature processes, policies and tools from the leading European federated e-Infrastructures to cover the whole life-cycle of services, from planning to delivery. The Hub aggregates services from local, regional and national e-Infrastructures in Europe, Africa, Asia, Canada and South America. The Hub acts as a single contact point for researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research. Through the virtual access mechanism, more scientific communities and users have access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. The project also improves skills and knowledge among researchers and service operators by delivering specialised trainings and by establishing competence centres to co-create solutions with the users. In the area of engagement with the private sector, the project creates a Joint Digital Innovation Hub that stimulates an ecosystem of industry/SMEs, service providers and researchers to support business pilots, market take-up and commercial boost strategies. EOSC-hub builds on existing technology already at TRL 8 and addresses the need for interoperability by promoting the adoption of open standards and protocols. By mobilizing e-Infrastructures comprising more than 300 data centres worldwide and 18 pan-European infrastructures, this project is a ground-breaking milestone for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud.

The underlying idea of this project was to enhance the existing e-learning infrastructure used within project-based learning courses and develop a methodology for its customisation and implementation to other courses. E-learning, as an approach, has a significant role in obtaining and acquiring digital skills due to its scalability and the possibility to update available content. Furthermore, through enriched e-learning experiences during their higher education, students got used to navigating digital content, engaging in online/virtual tasks, and generally becoming more comfortable with digital tools. Proposed e-learning infrastructure embraces existing Web and other ICT technologies that facilitate technical and non-technical knowledge and information exchange and foster creativity and problem-solving in virtual project-based learning courses. Four HEIs participated in the project: University of Zagreb, Croatia, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Politecnico di Milano, Italy and TU Wien, Austria. The fifth partner was University Computing Centre (SRCE) from Zagreb. The focus of the research and development activities in the project was on establishing e-learning platforms to adapt to the demanding needs of project-based design courses. New concepts and structure of the e-learning platform were established, implemented, and validated simultaneously with three consecutive years of student project-based learning courses, conducted in close cooperation with selected industrial partners. This way, a real industrial environment was simulated in order to thoroughly test, improve and demonstrate the intellectual outputs of this project. Four main intellectual outputs were proposed: - Proof-of-concept of the e-learning platform for virtual project-based design course (O1). This includes a definition of e-learning platform architecture and content type. As a part of activities related to this output, different problem-solving, creativity, CAD/CAE, and visualisation tools were tried out to check their suitability for virtual project-based learning courses. - Completed e-learning platform for virtual project-based design course (O2). The completed e-learning platform merges the general functionalities of online collaboration tools with problem-solving, creativity, CAD/CAE, and visualisation tools, which are needed for flawless project work in a virtual environment. - Methodology for customising and implementing e-learning platforms within project-based design courses (O3). - The virtual PBL course structure and organisation of the virtual workshop (O4). The obtained knowledge on e-learning systems and virtual tools allowed us to conduct the complete PBL course in an online environment seamlessly (advancement to previous course editions). A sequence of three consecutive summer semester courses at participating HEIs was used to conduct case studies and validate intellectual outputs. In addition, work done by students with the e-learning platform throughout the courses was presented on the final workshop events at the end of blended short-term mobility of the students. This project introduced students to the state-of-the-art digital technologies used in a virtual engineering environment, preparing them for the future working environment. The accompanying research studies resulted in invaluable insights for educational researchers. Project-based design courses are quite common on European and international universities, and the project outputs comprise guidelines on how to tailor e-learning platforms and how to provide students better digital support during PBL work. Therefore, the proposed platform can motivate educators on other academic institutions to further develop this key aspect of their design courses. As such, these courses would better reflect today’s engineering practice and attract more students because of their immediate applicability and hands-on experience (quite often neglected in traditional design courses).Since there is a continuous tendency to integrate more digital tools into engineering education, the outputs of this project could have a significant impact on different design project courses and the improvement of existing e-learning support for project-based learning in general. Building on these premises, we expect that project outputs could be adopted and used in other areas and sectors besides engineering design.

Digital Education (DE) has the potential to provide better teaching and learning opportunities, especially in regards to the unpredictable circumstances such as COVID-19 which revealed that many HEIs faced problems of technical, socio-psychological and didactic nature. The project Digital Education for Crisis Situations: Times When There is no Alternative (DECriS) aims to produce 6 IOs, organize 4 MEs, 2 Summer Schools in the form of blended learning as an ‘hybrid’ arena for exchange of experience and knowledge transfer, and to design and produce 2 tutorials which will equip teachers with new skills required in the production, reutilization and use of DE. The project’ target groups are students/teachers at partner HEIs and European HEIs that offer programs in (L)IS, which will be approached widely in regards to the use of OERs and ways for promoting, enriching and improving of DE for crisis situations, and beyond. In order to contribute to the building of inclusive HE systems and promoting internationalisation, DECriS project is focused on innovative digital practices experienced during the academic years 2019-20 and 2020-21 during lockdown and other mitigation periods without complete lockdown but without face-to-face classes. Project will focus in particular on digital competencies, new innovative curricula and educational methods; international cooperation; and cooperation with business sector. DECriS project aims to create a framework for proper adoption of OERs in general, and in crisis situations in particular, making sure they will: improve the quality of the DE and expand the possibilities for collaboration and knowledge sharing, which may decrease the feeling of isolation common in situations like lockdowns; support both teachers and students in their development, especially in terms of adaptive, personalized and smart learning; possibly, lead to cost savings and repurposing finances to other educational activities and resources, which, may further reduce the existing gaps and barriers; be used as adaptive, flexible and smart ‘tools’; improve students’ participation in virtual classrooms, i.e. generate appropriate level of interest and engagement which is also one of the common issues in the context of DE. We are implementing: a design for scale that makes our OERs scalable beyond the project and easily upgradeable and expandable, and a design with the user approach which allows us to create OERs that: truly originate from the needs of the specific HEI and teaching/studying community; empower HEI (as users) and teaching staff and students (as end-users) to become (co)producers of educational materials; a so-called LEGO approach (brick by brick or modular approach) in designing the OERs making them modifiable (e.g. creating derivative OERs) and optimized in regards to the different needs and goals (e.g. they can be remixed and improved, integrated into existing OERs, etc.) and adaptable to different socio-cultural contexts and situations, such as pandemic crisis, as well as certain technological requirements or limitations. The project is organised in 2 phases: In phase 1 we intend to produce 2 IOs: state-of-the-play of the use of OERs at European HEIs and the analysis of the perception of DE by students and teachers of the partner HEIs during COVID-19 lockdown with a list of observed problems, as well as perks and examples of good practice. In phase 2 we plan to produce and justify critical factors for evaluation of existing OERs from the point of view of their use during the COVID-19 crisis and special periods without face-to-face teaching; produce one new OER and enrich existing ones by pointing to useful and relevant parts for information extraction from the multimedia collections added to OERs and for automatic scene segmentation for retrieving meaningful fragments which are shareable and reusable; produce an apprenticeship framework in order to create new models for students’ online apprenticeship. We are framing project outputs based on a platform model which serves in a crisis situation and supports the mash up of different services, models, strategies and educational materials so that they respond to these shifted goals and accommodate new set of educational needs.The whole project is data driven thus facilitating efficient DE management, informed decision making in a crisis situation, and a systematic approach based on scientific investigation of strengths and deficiencies. Consortium: U of Osijek, Croatia; U of Barcelona, Spain; U of Hildesheim, Germany; SULSIT, Bulgaria, and U of Zagreb Computer Centre, Croatia and four associate partners. Being able to do the mapping through international cooperation does not only strengthen partners’ relations, but also positions the project’s efforts and results in the context of COVID-19 crisis which threatens our lives, interactive and multi-layered networked culture and economy that itself implies more connectedness and resourcefulness.