The overall goal of this project is to improve higher education provision in Kosovo and Albania, by building institutional capacity for international relations whereby establishing or making fully functional respective offices (including capacity for project cycle management) in all nine Kosovo and five Albanian consortium members. This project will build institutional capacity for the internationalization of HE in Kosovo and Albania, by improving capacity for project development and management through international expertise made available by European HEIs partnering in this project and exchange of good practice between the consortium members. This will make way for local higher education institutions to engage confidently in various academic and research cooperation initiatives in the region, in Europe and wider.The aim of the project is establish and develop fourteen fully functional offices of international cooperation that will also include the function of project cycle management. Currently, none of the new public universities in Kosovo and Albania has the capacity to fully run an International Cooperation Office, at a time when over 50% of students in European Higher Education institutions are studying or participating in one or another form of international studies and when a significant part of university life takes place in the form of various exchanges and mobilities. This makes it of paramount importance to build respective capacity for all members. This will ultimately contribute substantially to the quality of provision and will enrich university life and experiences of the student population in Kosovo and Albania. Therefore, having in mind the possibility of Erasmus + project to support this idea, we initiated the work as a consortium on developing this idea. The project will have very high importance in addressing increasing isolation, lack of quality international cooperation and lack of project initiatives from Kosovo and Albania universities.

The digital age in which we are living has witnessed very rapid and diverse developments in the field of ICT. As a result of this transformation imposed by the development of technology, many fields, professions, functions, jobs and tasks change and are modified many day by day, some of them even disappear or are completely replaced by digital technology. Immune to this development and transformation is not even the field of education (including teacher education), as the most important field of any society.In order not to lag behind the developed world, Kosovo and Albania (as a country in transition, not associated with the programme) must be prepared for the integration and most effective and efficient use of technology and digitalization in its education system, in order to modernise and improve the quality of this system. Analysing the situation from a cause-consequences perspective, it is evident that in Kosovo and Albania, pupils start to learn IT subject only after the sixth grade. In both countries, the ICT teachers at primary and middle school levels have in most cases a professional degree other than in ICT and are nevertheless involved in the ICT course instruction. The lack of programs tackling issues related to ICT in education is problematic and such a situation necessitates we act urgently and address immediate needs towards capacitating future teachers of pre-university level with knowledge, skills and values related to digital transformation in education. This could lead us in creation of a Teacher Educators ICT competence profile, crash course program for existing teachers to match these profiles, modification of ICT learning path for pupils in pre-university curriculum and creation of non-existing Bachelor Program and modernisation of existing teacher education programs with respect to ICT competences.

E-le.G.A.N.T.S. aims to establish new skills, concerning technological knowledge, training tools, knowledge sharing, networking, performing art and the ability to translate them into job opportunities, in the HEIs of three Western Balkan's targeted at developing a new digital readiness and at changing the relationship between curricula, skills, and performing events in a distant perspective digital dimension. The specific objectives of the project concern the role of higher education institutions in the partner countries for economic and social development and their specific capacities to link the academic world of culture and art, research activities to the labour market and civil society. The project focuses on three key aspects:1. Develop digital readiness in partners’ HEIs restructuring training models and contents. 2. To prepare HEI student in in ALB, MNE, and KOSOVO in order to enhance in a more effective way their (self) employability and the capacity to access the Creative Economy.3. Develop skills to tackle future employment perspectives and build international aggregated answer through a digital transformation, that, by definition, is borderless and asks to work globally The main output that project is committed to produce are: •Online trained course and implemented toolkit•Set up an LMS (MOOC) Platform and produced Learning objects•Organized StartCupThe project has a flexible approach in order to adapt the learning outcomes to the particular needs and digital skills of the participating learners, and will be structured in a way that allows them to improve their skills in a practical and concrete way, gaining a broader understanding and exchanging best practices and experiences. The students are the first beneficiaries of the project together with the teachers and other educational staff that will have the opportunity to integrate digital tools into their teaching.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a framework to share and re-use spatial data amongst public authorities, private sector and citizens. SDI are based on a series of agreements on technology standards, institutional settings and policies to unlock geospatial resources for a wide range of applications: e.g. environmental monitoring, transportation planning, health care, urban planning, etc. Since they are based on complex and permanently evolving technologies, and require innovative organisational, legal and institutional settings, the academic education related to SDI is challenging. No single university can provide education covering the complete geospatial field, so joint efforts are necessary. Especially since many of the societal challenges are cross-border and cross-policy phenomena. BESTSDI project is based on the results of the EU IPA2010 project “INSPIRATION – Spatial Data Infrastructure in the Western Balkans” (2012-2013) and the project “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the region of Western Balkan” (IMPULS), being under execution. The BESTSDI project refines and extends these developments in three ways:1) A successful SDI requires an active participation by all national and local governments within a country, its private sector and citizens. This active participation is impossible without appropriate SDI knowledge and skills. Thus, education on SDI must be properly introduced in higher education study programs for future professionals and life-long learning courses for present professionals. 2) An SDI comes to life, if published geospatial data is widely being (re-)used. BESTSDI covers both spatial data provision as well as its (re-)usage. Data (re-)usage scenarios cover requirements arising in the regional priority domains agriculture, forestry and fisheries. 3) All BESTSDI partner countries are either candidate or potential candidate countries of joining the European Union and have the obligation to implement EU Directives and policies.The BESTSDI project has raise knowledge level and awareness on SDI in higher education institutions in Western Balkans region developing SDI curriculum which has been implemented in teaching at all 15 partner institutions. It has provided students with new knowledge and skills to emerging labour market needed to implement EU Directives and policies on national levels. Moreover, it has attuned curricula to equip the students with transversal skills, such as entrepreneurship and general digital skills, improving their ability to work with other people. Through the project 15 SDI labs have been established at the partner universities supporting modern education methods and approaches enabling more than 2.500 student to attend new or modernized courses with SDI content in third year of project lifetime. The BESTDI project has also supported development of methodology and business models for introduction of delivery of the Life-long courses for professionals at the partner universities what has been implemented in third year of project lifetime.The BESTSDI project has also supported project partners to take proactive role u development of national SDI's in their countries. For this purpose for the first time project partners (academic institutions) delivered for the first time the annual national SDI reports promoting importance of SDI education and stakeholder cooperation. This resulted for partner countries universities in cooperation with several other projects, agreements with the national authorities, new conferences, strengthening regional cooperation and internationalization of universities.

The new paradigms of electricity grids and markets require that staff employed in electrical energy related jobs as well as electricity end users are properly educated and trained. The electrical engineering curricula in WBC, formed to serve the conventional model of one large scale power grid, owned and operated by one company, need to adapt. ELEMEND is designed to facilitate electrical engineering curricula in WBC to be competitive through teaching and training in smart gird and microgrid technologies and electricity markets. Courses at the BSc level and a MSc programme will be developed; academic and technical staff will be trained; new ICT tools, such as e-learning platforms and gamified content combined with blended learning, will be used; an internship programme will be put in place for the most motivated of the ELEMEND students; a University - enterprise network will be created within the project, around the core group of the ELEMEND industrial partners. The ELEMEND laboratories will be accessible to all partners and are expected to attract research funding while ELEMEND graduates are expected to have increased employability rates and play a leading role in their field. The student projects carried out in ELEMEND labs in the third project year will focus on real‐life problems and are expected to attract the interest of relevant stakeholders. Outputs, such as the e‐learning courses, the gamified applications, the virtual labs, the new courses and Master’s programme are expected to engage new students and relevant target groups after the lifetime of the project as well as enhance public’s awareness.