COVID-19 effects – Why?The sudden transformation of lecturing styles from physical, face-to-face teaching into the online, distance, “COVID19 style” teaching demanded considerable adaptations and changes from all teachers. These circumstances caused for many of them a series of issues and difficulties. This unexpected change affected all educators independent of the level or type of educational institution. Some of them without any or with very basic digital competencies in teaching had to start to teach online, overnight. They had to skip several steps in competency levels and perform online lectures without well-founded skills. Other teachers that have technical affinities, had problems with didactical structuring of the content and providing a meaningful learning sequence. All these experiences gained in the sudden transformation of the educational model caused by the COVID19 lock-down period, confirm the necessity of a common, standardized and structured content plan and references for diverse groups of educators. All educators could use such a plan for their personal orientation regarding online education (“Where do I stand?”) as well as for finding possible information on content (“Where do I find what I need to learn?”), in order to develop their digital competences. Reference point – What?The framework defines educators’ professional and pedagogic competences as well as learners’ competences in six specific areas e.g teaching, assessing, providing resources, in empowering learners and facilitating learners’ digital competencies and in the professional engagement of educators Each area outlines a certain number of competencies, all together 22. These competencies include a list of “activities.” These activities remain rather general and do not provide educators with practical information on how to achieve and implement the outlined goal in practice. All these are further broken down for six accumulative levels of progression A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2.Project GoalWhile DigCompEdu provides a general framework, as such it is difficult to use for educators trying to find out where they stand regarding their digital competencies and attempting to find relevant practical materials needed to improve their competencies. The goal of this project is to fill the DigCompEdu framework with concrete examples and content (output 1), to develop an online course on selected levels (output 2) and to establish an e-teaching manual for self-paced learning (output 3).The aim is thus to enhance and augment the framework so it can function as a practical, useful resource for educators willing to increase their digital competencies.Output 1 – a collection of content (curricular plan) Develop and create a curricular plan/collection of content for all six areas and corresponding competencies, structured along the six levels of progression and publish it on a website. Any educator, even those with little or no digital competences, can access and use this collection of content (curricular plan) for all six levels of progression, independently or guided, according to their own needs. In addition, any educator can find out what s/he can learn and which competencies s/he can develop in the structured curriculum plan; the content and competencies of which they were/are unaware. This will be done for all areas, competences and levels.Output 2 – online course with instructor(s) For one or two of the pedagogic competence areas outlined in DigCompEdu the project intends to develop fully online courses. Which of the four areas are chosen will depend on the needs of educators at the participating partner institutions. The course will be held for educators of the partner institutions and will offer flexibility in time with a fixed schedule for synchronous meetings. The project partners will agree upon the level or levels of the course content in these areas.Output 3 - e-teaching handbook for self-paced learning (without instructor)The materials developed for output 2 will then be adapted and made openly available in the form of an e-handbook/manuals for all educators. These e-manuals will be available online and will enable educators the independent (anytime, anywhere, without instructors), self-paced learning and developing of competences. The materials will be open access and available to all educators trying to improve their digital teaching competencies.The long-term benefit is the dissemination of common European curricular plan with concrete topics and content of digital competences for educators (DigCompEdu) and increasing and enhancing the educators’ awareness of the necessity of constant individual development of their digital competencies. It is envisaged that in the future all areas and competence levels listed in DigiCompEdu will be filled/will have corresponding online courses.

Including children with special educational needs (SEN) in Bhutanese regular classroom is a recent concept. With much awareness and initiatives for the inclusion of children with SEN in mainstream schools by government agencies, local civil society organizations and international organizations, there has been increase in the enrollment of children with SEN in schools every year. But given the limited professional support in the classroom and resource constraints, supporting children with SEN has been a major challenge. Studies have claimed that Bhutanese classrooms with large size (40 to 45 students in a classroom) handled by a single SEN teacher who do not have formal qualification of teaching children with SEN has posed a serious challenge in supporting the needs of the children with SEN. Further, this situation is worsened by the fact that Bhutanese classrooms do not have teacher assistants to support the children and SEN teachers. Therefore, it is asserted that the provision of teacher assistants to assist students with SEN in schools would ease the burden of under resourced teachers. In addition, the need for teacher assistants has been emphasized in Bhutan's Standard for SEN (2017), National Policy for Persons with Disabilities (2019) and other national policies alike. With these national issues and policy expectations the Royal University of Bhutan (RUB) has proposed this project in developing and implementing the first ever National Diploma programme in Teacher Assistant. This project will have implications for RUB in terms of capacity building, best practices, and industrial linkages with EU HEIs. It is also expected that with the implementation of this project, children with SEN and their parents in Bhutan are benefited, and provide employment opportunities to Bhutanese youths. All in all, this project is expected to address in attaining the the long term SDGs and the aspirations of developmental philosophy of Gross National Happiness.

ContextThis project will develop a set of core principles that institutions can use to help them design, construct and develop new learning and teaching spaces. Increasingly, quality assurance in higher education is expanding to include a wide range of aspects of university life that includes buildings and the environment. The physical space of universities has often focused on the activities of learning and teaching. This project would provide a framework for institutions to work within to ensure that they make best use of their resources.ObjectivesThe aim of the project is to develop a set of comprehensive design principles that institutions can draw on to inform the development of new learning spaces. The project aim will be achieved by addressing the following objectives: -To identify the meaning of 'innovative learning and teaching' in different contexts across Europe;-To identify existing policy and practice towards learning and teaching space and related issues across EU and national HE sectors;-To identify policy and practice towards learning and teaching space and related issues in other national HE sectors;-To explore practice and principles in building and developing space in other sectors;-To explore the extent to which QA includes the built environment;-To identify existing practice and principles across the partnership institutions;-To share practice and examples across the partnership;-To highlight examples of good practice in design and development of learning and teaching space.Number and profile of participantsThe partnership will include six institutions from diverse regions of the EHEA and be a small, manageable partnership of institutions which have some notable experience in building and developing learning and teaching spaces. However, it is important that the partnership includes institutions with a variety of experiences as well as engaging different regions, reflecting the huge variations in learning and teaching traditions. Description of activitiesThe principal output of the project will be a set of core principles that institutions can use to help them to design new learning and teaching spaces, whether developing existing buildings or constructing new spaces. This output would need to be built upon two core sets of data: wider, national explorations of policy and practice followed by a series of case studies that explore the issues facing universities in building new learning and teaching spaces, determining what works and what does not work and highlighting good practice.Methodology to be usedThe project will take a pragmatic approach, where each stage of the project is informed by the previous stage. This approach has proved successful in several of our previous EU-funded projects and is logical for the proposed project. The first stage of the project would be to undertake a set of studies to identify policy and practice across national higher education sectors. The second stage of the project would be to focus on the partner institutions and explore what activity is currently in process, what approaches are taken to building new learning and teaching spaces and stakeholder perceptions of the space available to them. These two stages of work would inform the core output of this project, the basic principles of constructing learning and teaching spaces. The resulting output will be piloted and evaluated.ResultsThe key tangible result of this project will be a manual to inform university design to facilitate innovative learning and teaching spaces. Other results will be data relating to the extent and development of innovative learning and teaching space within the EHEA.ImpactThe main impact of the project would be to encourage wider consideration of how the design of learning spaces contributes to the implementation of innovative and effective learning and teaching practice across the EHEA.Potential longer term benefitsThe project will share good practice in facilitating innovative learning and teaching, taking account of the rapid acceleration of technological innovation and how this is driving L&T and student engagement. This could also include relatively new developments such as how learning analytics is contributing to a greater understanding of how learners use resources. In other words, design of learning spaces has to take into account technological development and changes in L&T delivery as well as responding to student engagement evidenced through data collection.

With the growth of globalization, education and employability challenges, there is an expanded need to graduate confident future leaders by providing them with the necessary documents supplement to their diploma and helping them highlight on their qualifications acquired from different Higher Education institutions. The right implementation of the project will result in various outputs and products that will promote the Higher Education System in Lebanon. The project could eventually unite universities, graduates, employers and other stakeholders for the sake of delivering a Diploma Supplement that could translate the qualifications and skills of students and refugees graduated from Lebanese Higher Education institutions. These outputs are summarized as follows:- Clear educational objectives and student outcomes for degree programs- Principles for generating a Diploma Supplement similar to the ones adopted in Europe- A national information centre which oversees the Lebanese Diploma Supplements issuance and raises awareness on its benefits to students and refugees- A platform “LEBPASS” that includes the Diploma Supplement module and other related modulesThe envisioned impacts of the project are really promising and listed as follows:1- Sufficient independent data to promote transparency between Lebanese and other Higher education Systems 2- A potential initiative towards recognition of prior learning and pre-university education for all students including refugees willing to resume their university studies in Lebanon3- A clarified common language for the nature, level, context, content and status of university studies in Lebanon4- Role model for Higher Education Systems in the region through the establishment of the LEBPASS platform and the Lebanese National Recognition Information Centre. This project shall be supported by European expertise that is of added value to the implementation process by offering guidance towards best practices adopted in Europe.

According to widespread belief, in a globalized world of knowledge societies, 'universities are now more important for socioeconomic mobility, for knowledge production, for generating economic and civic leaders, and for pushing innovation and societal self-reflection than in any other time in their history' (J.A. Douglass, 2016, The New Flagship University, Palgrave Macmillan, p. xiii). Therefore, quality assurance (QA) and enhancement in higher education institutions (HEIs), in particular in learning and teaching (L&T) is more important than ever which immediately implies that a need for systematic performance (core) data, performance indicators and Learning Analytics exists. These will allow to balance various stakeholders' requests for 'Smarter Universities' and comprehensive (Digital) Performance Data Management (DPDM), i.e., (digitised) performance monitoring and evaluation including profile-driven quality enhancement and evidence-based strategic governance. The SQELT project aims at establishing a comprehensive L&T core dataset (LTCD) for assessing HEIs' performance quality in L&T. The LTCD shall be based on the general criteria of empirical reliability and relevance for quality enhancement and strategic governance; it shall include data definition, data formats and software-adequacy; operationalization capacity shall be analyzed at least for important selected core data. LTCD includes generic core data relevant to any HEI. At the same time, LTCD will be part of a toolbox from which HEIs can select 'individual' performance data according to their specific strategic profile, mission and vision. The SQELT project will also attempt to identify ('construct') related performance indicators. The integrative LTCD shall be prepared for its use in DPDM, in particular Learning Analytics, including an ethical code of practice. That way, the SQELT project will contribute to the ‘Research on Indicators of Teaching Quality’, and thus to what was recently recommended to the European Parliament: ‘In order to strengthen the role and weight of teaching and learning in international rankings, more research on adequate and internationally comparable indicators for the quality of teaching appears desirable, even necessary. […] Should it be possible to define a set of usable key indicators, the next step would be the creation of a global data collection and feeding into an international database, to be run by trusted international actors, like the EU, the OECD or the UNESCO’ (Wächter, B. et al., 2015, University Quality Indicators: A Critical Assessment. Directorate General for International Policies, p. 78). The results of the SQELT project shall help to ensure HEI stakeholders get maximum benefit from LTCD and DPDM. To this end HEIs should use systems that are designed in consultation with stakeholders; supported by an ethical code of practice; driven by the improvement of performance processes and stakeholder engagement; 'tailored to the particular needs of each institution; embedded in an institution’s strategic plan’ (Higher Education Commission, 2016, From Bricks to Clicks. The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education, Policy Connect, p. iii). The main target groups of the SQELT project are HEIs' actors in L&T and stakeholders interested in L&T quality enhancement - students, parents, employers, HE politics, QA agencies. The SQELT project intends to include as many of these as possible. Since SQELT has the character of a pilot project with limited capacities, however, the focus will pre-eminently be on HEIs including students, teaching staff and internal QA, and secondly on QA agencies and HE politics. The SQELT project builds on available models of DPDM in L&T, an analysis of current literature, own DPDM models and practice of project participants, external experts’ knowledge, and surveys with the project's HEI partners about their assessments of relevance and actual use of performance data and indicators. The LTCD will be developed by conceptual analysis and comparison of the various sources including benchmarking of the partner HEIs and an impact analysis to support inductive development of a reference framework for LTCD. The SQELT Consortium consists of ten institutional partners from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal and United Kingdom, among them eight HEIs, one research centre and one QA agency, who develop, evaluate and apply LTCD. The project has six Transnational Project Meetings and nine Multiplier Events, among them one International Evaluation Workshop, one International Conference and seven Euro-Region Dissemination Workshops. The main outputs will be a Benchlearning Report, LTCD, Evaluation Report, Ethical Code of Practice for Learning Analytics, Manual SQELT LTCD, and, last but not least, peer-reviewed publications of the results.