LOESS will map, connect and engage with multiple actors in Communities of Practice (CoPs) to provide an overview of the current level of soil related knowledge in different educational levels and develop teaching programmes and materials including an Atlas of Soil Education. LOESS will explore educational needs amongst school pupils (primary and secondary levels), students (tertiary level) and young professionals, and society across the European Union and Horizon Europe Associated Countries. LOESS will investigate why existing material is not used to a greater extent and co-create courses and modules for soil education, including virtual reality/augmented reality applications. These resources will target the different stages of education and connect to global and local challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss and the Sustainable Development Goals. LOESS will co-create and test pedagogical techniques to encourage effective knowledge flows and discourse between educators and learners and between different knowledge systems (scientific, political, individual local and collective cultural knowledge). It will carry out activities in 15 countries and provide hands-on activities related to soil education through Community Engaged Research and Learning. To overcome the awareness gap, LOESS will organise focused campaigns and events to exchange knowledge, promote discussion on the results and encourage higher uptake. LOESS will also engage with public authorities and institutions responsible for primary, secondary and tertiary education and provide targeted recommendations and resources for improved knowledge enhancement. Capacity building, knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning will accompany LOESS' education and dissemination activities.

TeRRIFICA – Territorial RRI Fostering Innovative Climate Action – will create a comprehensive overview on the state of the art of climate change adaptation research, tangible climate action and climate change adaptation examples, related policies as well as communication strategies and methods at different levels of complexity. Through its co-creative multi-stakeholder approaches the project will identify opportunities, drivers and barriers of implementation. It takes into account challenges for the acceptance and feasibility, technological and regulatory constraints in six pilot regions in Spain, Germany, France, Serbia, Poland and Belarus. The selected pilot regions cover the diversity of climate change mitigation approaches in Central– South, East – West, urban – rural, EU – non-EU settings. The project will define and adapt innovative communication strategies, dialogue actions and formats. Through Living Lab methodologies, different stakeholder-groups (with a particular focus on regional authorities and policy makers) will be integrated as co-creating and actively participating partners. This will lead to recommendations, procedures, tools and methodologies that are appropriate to the different roles and objectives of these parties and which will consider the key policies of RRI and integrate Sustainable Development Goals. TeRRIFICA will set up tailored roadmaps and key performance indicators for the implementation of developed methodologies and climate change adaptation activities in regional practice. Customised capacity building for the different stakeholder groups will be offered. Field trips to local and regional promising activities related to research and regional innovation, and broader stakeholder engagement with feedback loops will be organised to learn from these examples of innovation and create input for the next stages of development.

Higher Education Institutions and Responsible Research and Innovation (HEIRRI) foster an alignment of research and innovation (R&I) with the needs, values and societal expectations. The six key aspects of “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)”-societal/public engagement, gender equality, open access, science education, ethics and governance in R&I-are transdisciplinary included at all stages of formation of scientist and engineers, and other professional fields involved in R&I. HEIRRI will create and share on OA a stock-taking inventory constituted by a State of the Art Review and a Data Base. The inventory will gather results of other EU funded RRI projects, good cases and practices of RRI and RRI Learning. Also, different stakeholders involved and/or affected by R&I will participate in a debate and reflection process on RRI Learning through online and offline Forum actions. Results from the inventory will represent the basis for RRI Training programs and formative materials, offering the students knowledge and skills to develop viable solutions to specific problems related to R&I, integrating theory and practice. They will be designed for the different HEI educational levels (undergraduate, MD and PhD, summer courses and MOOC), mainly based on Problem based learning methodology, and supported by multimedia materials (videos and microvideos, 2.0 materials, etc.). All results and products elaborated by HEIRRI will be uploaded on OA at RRITools Platform. An internationalization plan will guarantee their spreading awareness and future use by HEI from Europe and beyond. A global scope and expertise on RRI will be provided by HEIRRI consortium that consists of 5 European HEI (Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Universitetet I Bergen (UiB), Aarhus Universitet (AU), Institut Fuer Hoehere Studien und Wissenschaftliche Forschung (IHS), Sveuciliste u Splitu (University of Split, UNIST)), the European network of science centres and museums (AEESTI / Ecsite), Fundación Bancaria Caixa D'estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona La Caixa (FBLC), a network of universities (Associació Catalana d'Universitats Públiques, ACUP), and a private company specialized in R&I (INNOVATEC).

Context/ backgroundMaster’s education in Europe faces huge and varied diversity: of functions of programmes, labour market expectations, multidisciplinarity, international student mobility, etc. This is the background for the Mastermind Europe project as is shown in the rest of this summary, the overall report and the main project Outputs (in annex).ObjectiveMastermind Europe aimed to support Master’s programmes to adapt their admission for a more diverse and international pool of applicants by developing and testing a toolkit and Pool of experts.The Guiding Tools on Coherent admission, Subject knowledge, Academic Competence, Personal competence, Language proficiency and the Admission process. are on the website www.mastermindeurope.eu, developed and improved through 8 Focus Group meetings and 12 pilots Three survey-base reports underpin the evidence-base for the Mastermind Europe approach.Mastermind Europe provides a tool for voluntary use, to be fit to individual sizes. The proof of its value is in the eating and will show over time.But all responses so far have been positive: on the merit, the usefulness and the intention to actually use it.ConsortiumThe consortium of 6 universities, 3 associations in Higher Education and 2 private companies in Higher Education in 8 countries has worked well. Cooperation and communication has been excellent, with strong mutual respect – between partners with often very little previous work together. Each partner fulfilled important roles and made essential contributions to the outputs and the process. The special committees for Finance and Communication worked well; the Flexible Project Fund played a crucial role.ActivitiesTo produce the Guiding Tools and Expert pool and test them - and further develop them - we used the Transnational Project meetings as well as other meetings and digital communication. The website and final conference played key roles in dissemination - as did the 19 external events, the Newsletter with 176 subscribers and the Repository of documents. The Evidence reports helped strengthen the evidence base for a competency-assessment approach to Master's admissionResults / ImpactThe intended impact has been at the level of the European Higher Education Area rather than a narrow focus on the Consortium partners; the Consortium composition reflects this 6 universities, with 2 associations of universities (German and Catalan), one overarching European association (ACA), and two private companies.The impact within the Consortium was significant overall: five of the six universities actually conducted a pilot to apply the Toolbox and Expert pool at the level of individual Master’s programmes and invited the Mastermind Expert team to guide that process.Outside the consortium, we reached well over a thousand academic Master's coordinators, policy makers, vice-deans education, ministry officials, etc. Of the 226 participants in either a Focus Group meeting and/or the Final Conference 65 participants gave unsolicited positive feedback and 68 responded favourably to the end-of-project survey.We had specific policy impact at HE system level in the Netherlands and Catalunya, where educational authorities and overarching universities’ associations underlined the value of our approach and results. Long term benefitsThe Mastermind Toolkit and Expert pool will continue to help key players in the HE systems (academic Master’s coordinators, policy makers and decision makers at Faculty, University, national, and European levels) to cope with the increasing diversity in Master’s programmes. It will remain available - with expert support where asked - to help diversify the pool of successful applicants as well as raise expertise and ability to articulate 'learning incomes' in terms of subject-related knowledge & skills, general academic competencies, personal competencies & traits, as well as linguistic skills. Arguably, the Mastermind Europe project has contributed significantly to the development of the conceptual framework – the language so to speak – with which to discuss and develop a vision on Master’s admission and Master’s education that, on the one hand, is better adapted to the diversity and, on the other, gives more prominence to the general academic and personal competencies – or transversal skills that the modern labour market requires.Monitoring and quality assuranceThe Quality Council served well as both sounding board and critical reflection platform for the project. We have invited the members of the QC to remain in this role in the post-project continuation and we expect that most members will follow the three who have immediately pledged their continued engagement.

"The DECODE Sustainability project aims at fostering the institutionalisation of Sustainable Development in university department to spearhead their contributions to sustainability, aimed necessary for addressing challenges in European societies, industries and economies. The DECODE Sustainability project will develop a tool-based process to ensure an innovative, relevant and dynamic upskilling and collaborative approach that stimulates entrepreneurial and engaged thinking and acting in deans, aiming at strengthening their commitment and decisions towards increasing sustainability impacts.Higher Education is considered a pre-requisite in the advancement of sustainability due to their mandate of creating knowledge and forming new leaders with the competences and vision to foster change (EC 2019; Cheeseman 2019). However, HEI efforts, although echoed across national strategies and policies, remain at an operational level that has yet to transcend to a systemic embeddedness (UNESCO 2015). The DECODE Sustainability project addresses the need of strengthening the link between HE and sustainability by providing HEIs with a suitable tool-based process to institutionalise SD at the department level and contribute to its impact.To accomplish its primary goal of institutionalising SD at departmental level, the project puts HEI deans in the focus. HEI deans are often regarded as the main driving force behind strategic initiatives such as SD, yet the assumption that HEI deans possess the relevant skills to ensure strategising and operationalising SD often does not hold waters. In the practical domains HEI deans struggle to pursue this aim, due to the lack of clear goals, and unknown barriers and strengths (GUNi, 2019). Currently, HEI SD initiatives hinge on curricula development and student initiatives (Mula 2017). However, a lively enacting of SD in HEI is scarce and demands a transformation starting from individual mind-sets towards SD, fostering departmental change. DECODE Sustainability pillars are entrepreneurship and engagement as the vehicle to enable such change as it empowers staff to create public value, as prioritised by the Renewed EU Agenda for Higher Education (EC 2017).The principal aim of the DECODE Sustainability project is creating departmental governance changes that are effective and efficient in the creation of sustainability impact. For this purpose, the project will:1)Facilitate the identification and understanding of key challenges and opportunities in integrating SD into HEI departments 2)Create a vibrant ""sustainability community"" of deans and their representatives 3)Dissect the complex task of departmental SD integration into smaller pieces (process steps, tools)4)Foster deans’ abilities to integrate SD as a corner stone of their academic unit 5)Create a clear path and decisions to increase departmental contributions to SD Project approach and outputsThe DECODE Sustainability project will (1) establish a baseline report to ascertain SD needs in HEI, (2) design innovative tools and training program to upskill deans and representatives in SD through entrepreneurial and engaged thinking and acting, (3) facilitate communication and share of experiences of deans and representatives towards enhancing SD impacts in their departments, and (4) provide a tool-based process to roadmap future action towards SD impact. The project includes five intellectual outputs:IO1 – DECODE HEI Sustainability Analysis: a mapping of the status of the integration of SD within academic units at HEIsIO2 – DECODE Deans Council and Platform: an implementation framework for the Council creation, and a web-based platform (DECODE Connect) for interaction, collaboration and peer-learningIO3 – DECODE Toolkit: a collection of instruments and best practices supporting systemic change in university departmentsIO4 – DECODE Impact Pathways and Impact Roadmaps Framework: a framework for generic Impact Pathways to advance departmental contributions to sustainability, and a framework for the creation of department-specific Impact Roadmaps (based on generic Pathways) which will outline the guide actions to promote positive changeIO5 – DECODE Empowerment Program for Impact Roadmap Design: a training program aimed at equipping deans and their representatives for sustainability with the right knowledge, skills and tools to design a department-specific Impact Roadmap The outputs will(1) decode the complex task of SD integration in academia into a comprehensible and manageable tool-supported process(2) contribute to positioning SD at a tactical level and equip deans and their representatives with the right knowledge, skills and peer-learning mechanisms(3) create substantial advancements in SD integration in departments through a holistic framework that is comprehensive in scope whilst easy to implement in practice"