"It is a commonly held belief that contemporary society is changing rapidly in the 21st century. As a result, citizens are charged with the task to reach the hectic pace of technological evolution in every aspect of their life. Furthermore life-long learning is widely accepted to be an inevitable part of modern man’s life in order to survive in an extremely competitive working environment. ICT plays a significant role in life-long learning as those without digital skills are nowadays considered to be illiterate. Even those with basic digital skills soon feel inefficient to respond to modern market demands, while those that manage to follow the technological changes and have advanced digital skills are much in request and very well-paid. The European Commission is promoting various initiatives aimed at increasing training in digital skills for the workforce; modernising education across the EU; harnessing digital technologies for learning and for the recognition and validation of skills; and anticipating and analysing skills needs.A strong digital economy is vital for innovation, growth, jobs and European competitiveness. The spread of digital is having a massive impact on the labour market and the type of skills needed in the economy and society.It is changing the structure of employment, leading to the automation of ""routine"" tasks and to the creation of new and different things: - It is leading to the need for more skilled ICT professionals in all sectors of the economy. It is estimated that there will be 500,000 unfilled vacancies for ICT professionals by 2020. - It is leading to the need for digital skills for nearly all jobs where ICT complements existing tasks. Careers such as engineers, teachers and many more - require increasing levels of digital skills.- It changes the way we learn by fostering online communities, by enabling personalised learning experiences, by supporting the development of soft skills such as problem solving, collaboration and creativity, and by making learning fun.- It is leading to the need for every citizen to have at least basic digital skills in order to live, work, learn and participate in the modern society.- The full potential for improving education through ICT in Europe remains yet to be discovered and this is why the European Commission is developing policy and supporting research to make learners fit for 21st century life and work.Educators of all sectors but most importantly adult education trainers face many challenges as they deal with increasingly complex and diverse learning situations and meet competence demands in a constantly changing work environment with the evolvement of new technologies, a constantly changing labour market with highly technical skill demands and a challenging socio-economic context. As a result, there is an urgent need for adult education trainers to enhance the uptake of ICT in teaching and learning, to promote stronger coherence of the needs of the labour market thus achieving a better skill match for their students as well as bridging the gap between education and the working world.The project will aim to develop an online learning platform and mobile tools for adult education trainers’ digital skills and competences improvement by participating in personal professional development programme. The Project will enhance digital integration in learning, teaching and training while promoting access and learning through open educational resources, supporting ICT-based training, learning and assessment at the education level.Project consortium will create an online, dynamic, multi assessed online platform, which will provide appealing and effective high tech possibilities for level – measuring, training and validating digital skills. This will help adult education trainers to control skill deficit and update their abilities throughout their career focusing on the current needs of the labour market and the economy. Project target groups are adult education trainers and LLP centre lecturers.Project intellectual outputs are:1. Digital literacy technical requirement report2. Digital skills learning outcomes for adult education trainers3. Digital skills training online learning platform 4. Mobile application for educational and technical softwares5. The usability toolkitProject partners have expertise in pedagogy and new ICT technologies into formal and non-formal education. All partners have necessary human capacity, experience and technical resources to fulfil requirements of the project activities. Partner organisations are university, adult education and training centres, vocational training institute, software development company and educational NGO."

Achieving high levels of ecological behaviour is of utmost importance across all EU member states, in order to address the World and Europe strategical targets at their root. The EcoLOG project, a partnership of Municipality of Zlatograd (BG), EcologyKM (BG), EUFORA (GR), EUROCY (CY), Voluntary Unit Plovdiv 112 (BG) and SoftQNR (SR), is implemented as a response to the relevant challenges, aiming to enable local/regional/national organisations, in collaboration with SMEs, NGOs and education stakeholders, to actively promote ecological behaviour, environmental attitude and responsibility feelings of their members through innovative virtual-reality-based training. Ecology is the science dealing with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. This is interpreted in the project as covering the following aspects: -Clean and safe environment; -Energy efficiency and sustainability; -Inclusion of disadvantaged groups (people with disabilities, migrants);-Inclusion of tourists; -Interaction between members of an organisation; -Bridging age and other cultural gaps; -Addressing violence and crime; -Improving gender balance.The EcoLOG project sets the following educational and sustainability objectives:-Significantly increase the awareness of municipality citizens about the dimensions of ecological behaviour and its importance to their quality of life, boost their skills and competencies related to implementing ecological behaviour and achieve their engagement in building cooperative ecological sensitivity.-Actively involve the local authorities, social partners, small-medium enterprises, vocational education providers, general education stakeholders, as well as visitors, in online informal learning experience with clear learning objectives. -Create and integrate state-of-the-art mobile learning technologies for the uninterrupted delivery of the eco-responsible learning resources. -Implement attractive open education resources (OER), based on sound understanding of the domain of required skills and the profile of target stakeholders.-Achieve the engagement of authorities and enterprises in offering tangible motivations for citizens to demonstrate ecological skills and subsequently ecological behaviour.-Achieve the engagement of formal/informal education providers and other social partners in the take-up of the EcoLOG outputs and their transfer through sustainable local ecosystems EcoLOG will put emphasis on the cross-generation skills’ acquisition, by engaging young adults together with older adults and senior citizens in informal learning activities, aiming to achieve uniform results in ecological sensitivity across population age levels. It is expected that, beyond the immediate ecological responsibility skills, fostering the interaction between citizens of different age levels through the training activities, will have additional diverse social impact; bridging the generations gap, transferring knowledge and experience of older citizens to younger ones; transferring modern thinking of society sustainability from younger population to older ones.In summary, the EcoLOG project will produce the following outputs:1.A virtual-reality-based mobile game environment, where certain single- or multi-player missions/scenarios will be executed. All scenarios will be implemented considering multiple players, however, in the case of a scenario being executed by a single player, the rest of the roles will be undertaken by non-playing characters with built-in behaviour. A set of five scenarios will be created in the framework of the project, addressing: i) Clean and safe environment; ii) Energy efficiency and sustainability; iii) Inclusion of disadvantaged groups (people with disabilities, migrants); iv) Inclusion of tourists; v) Addressing violence and crime. The rest of the eco-responsibility dimensions, i.e., the interaction between members of an organisation, the bridging of age and other cultural gaps, as well as the improvement of gender balance, will be addressed horizontally in the five scenarios.2.A MOOC will be created offering a set of modules that will address the five topics related to the above-mentioned scenarios. The course will focus on non-formal learning and self- crowd- assessment, gathering and transferring learning objects from already existing curricula.3.A mobile learning platform which will offer access to the course material, as well as to the game environment with the implemented scenarios. The platform will also facilitate the registration of players, their assessment with respect to acquiring skills and competences and demonstrating eco-responsibility and their subsequent collection of credits.

"As the conflict in Syria approaches its 8th year, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe are dealing with the worst humanitarian disaster since the Second World War. The unprecedented refugee crisis is increasingly spilling over to affect apart from the wider region, also Europe. Reality shows that refugee people face a range of barriers to enter urban life in their new countries, especially related to the fact that the municipality is not prepared for dealing with refugee people. This situation has forced municipalities and local authorities to assume key roles in managing the crisis by providing services and integrating refugees into their communities. The refugee crisis has also caused social tensions so ensuring social cohesion by involving both refugees and host communities in joint activities will contribute to improved relations, coexistence and stability within host municipalities.The project of ""Supporting Public Education Centers' Educators for Refugee Adaptation"" (PEC4R) addresses inclusive support for training of the municipal Public Edducational Centers' (PEC) educators to provide well-qualified education, so they can cope with refugee adults often lacking the language skills they can fully participate, and are also affected by the traumas of war that are fully disabled and integrated. Municipal PEC educators facing such problems should be more prepared to know how to deal with it. Ensuring the provision of a modular training that addresses the main issues (integration, adaptation, language, war traumas, dealing with stress, right of refugees) should form an important part of the response to the current challenges. This training and supporting will combat at source some of the factors contributing to education failure of these people, while it would aid in combatting the risk of integration problems to urban life. Supporting material provided consists of an illustrated handbook for the PEC educators with accompanying printed/mobile/online supporting tools that will support the advisor throughout the different challenges they face nowadays. Equally, the supporting tools will also work towards engaging PEC educators and refugee people in a manner that is novel, attractive for both the municipality and the refugees (beneficiary). The outcomes can be easily multiplied across all cities that harbor refugee by applying the concept of open resources, commons creative licensing and free mobile and online applications.Our consortium:1- Coordinator: Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Public University, Turkey 2- Phoneix KM, NGO, Beligum3- SoftQNR, software development company, Serbia. 4- Konya Municipality, Turkey5- Izmir Bakırçay University, Public University, Turkey6- Secondary Education Directorate of Karditsa, National Public Body, GreeceThe project's main target groups are:- Municipalities and their PEC educators: Every EU municipality network will be invited to the project portal, while contacts will be made also with local supporting initiatives.- Pedagogical and psychological experts: Material will be readily available to these stakeholders and will be implementable default in 5 languages, while translations can be done freely.- Refugee adults (living in the city): They are to benefit from an approach that allows them to deal with their war traumas, being supported by teaching staff that is aware of the sensitivities and the special requirements needed for these people to integrate into their city environments and the host country.Long-term benefitsThe desired impact of PEC4R is a universal one, due to the global occurrence of the refugee problem. This is reflected in below local, regional, national, European and/or international impact assessments. It is expected that the PEC4R will provide supporting material for all affected PECs as well as other adult edcuation institutions in all partner countries at the end of the project, while transfers to other languages will also support the take-up."

Inclusive education lies at the heart of the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It gives direction to governments, administrators, educators, parents and people with disabilities on how to achieve this aim. In response, our project's primary objective is to support inclusive education systems by developing tools that can help school staff develop the potential in every learner, and to accommodate particular students with different impairments, so that those with special educational needs (SEN) can be included in mainstream classrooms. At the heart of our project is an AI-enabled tool to support the decision making processes of teachers in inclusive education in the types of pedagogical approach that should be adopted for each child.We have achieved this by developing a mobile App that uses sensor data (e.g. eye gaze, body posture and facial features) and Machine Learning to infer the level of engagement in learning activities of each individual child using a simple 'Traffic Light' system as an output of the App. This is supported by a Handbook, which provides teachers in inclusive settings with a range of practical strategies to re-engage each child should engagement wane (our 'What's Next' approach). In addition, we have developed a set of interactive games which allow us to gather sensor data from a wide range of students with mild and moderate learning disabilities throughout our partner countries to robustly train the engagement algorithm operating at the heart of our App. Our Manual gives inclusive teaching staff practical guidelines on installing and using the App. Our primary target groups are inclusive teaching staff - including teachers, teaching assistants and Special Educational Needs Coordinators working with students with mild and moderate learning disabilities in a range of formal learning environments - in mainstream, inclusive and special needs schools. We also promote the use of our tools in other settings - with parents and carers, and to support the social and emotional health needs of students. Pathway+ comprises partners from 5 countries: - Nottingham Trent University - United Kingdom - National Association Of Professionals Working With People With Disabilities - Bulgaria - Centre for Special Educational Support - Bulgaria - International Association for Research and Development of Vocational education and Training - Turkey - Nottingham City Council - United Kingdom - PhoenixKM - Belgium - SOFTQNR - Serbia The following project results have been created: - IO1: A descriptive map of effective pedagogical approaches to promote inclusive education. - IO2: A set of mobile games to gather sensor data to train our engagement algorithm. - IO3: A Mobile App with a 'Traffic-Light' system to give a real time indication of the level of engagement of students. - IO4: A Handbook for inclusive teaching staff and 'What's Next' section to give practical guidance on strategies to re-engage students. - IO5: A Manual for inclusive teaching staff on installing and using the App. - E1: An online Multiplier event. - A series of Piloting Events in the UK, Belgium, Bulgaria and Turkey. Impact attained: The Pathway+ partnership has created a unique set of AI-enabled tools for the assessment of learners` engagement using embedded sensors in mobile devices, together with a set of interactive games that are used to train our engagement algorithm. Packaged along with a Handbook to support inclusive teaching staff in selecting teaching strategies to re-engage students and a Manual to describe the installation and use of the App, our tools have already had an immediate impact on the organisations involved in the Pathway+ consortium. They have increased their organisational capacities by using these tools when working with teaching professionals and other specialists providing training and support to SEN students. Teachers working in inclusive mainstream education, school psychologists, special educators, resource tutors, pedagogical advisors and teaching assistants all over Europe have access to our AI-enabled tool which can be used direcly within the classroom, and indeed in other informal settings to support all students and ensure they reach their full potential. The piloting phase of our project has involved more than 150 inclusive education teachers who iteratively tested the Pathway+ outcomes with more than 200 SEN students. The results were used not only to train the engagement algorithm in the development stage of our project, but to also enrich inclusive teaching practices and transform the educational process for students with mild and moderate learning disabilities. Positive results from the piloting phases and the resulting positive impact achieved demonstrates that Pathway+ has the potential for a transformational impact on teachers' attitudes to AI approaches to help them to engage more effectively with students with disabilities.

CONTEXT - Prevalence of students with autistic spectrum conditions (ASC) varies in European countries, from 4.4 - 19.7 per 1,000, aged 7-9 years.The UK Govt. autism strategy - ‘Fulfilling and rewarding lives’ (2014) has a particular focus on promoting innovation in service provision. Legislation provides for new duties and services including a disability support system that covers education (e.g., the ‘Children and Families Act 2014’).Up to 71% of students with ASC attend mainstream schools, and it is important to provide them with an environment adjusted to their needs, and free of any emotional trauma. However, research shows that mainstream schools are frequently fully neither educated nor equipped to deal with the needs of an autistic child, and give the necessary support. Without individualised support, it is highly unlikely that a pupil with ASC will make the academic and social progress that they should.60% of the teachers in England do not feel they have had the adequate training to teach children with autism, and that this situation is not improving (‘Ambitious About Autism’). 40% of children with ASC have been bullied (Autism Education Trust). A staggering 70% of parents are not satisfied with the level of understanding of autism in their child’s school.‘Autism Europe’ states that Education must be adapted, to allow: assessment to determine needs and strengths, fully informing and involving families, training to help pre-empt or manage challenging behaviour, individual education and support plans, opportunities to learn skills and engage in socially inclusive situations, and education and support to help prevent secondary consequences of their difficulties such as anxiety disorders and depression.OBJECTIVESTo address these challenges, our project will transfer and further refine an innovative AI-driven tool to help teachers, support staff, parents and carers to better understand the behavioural and cognitive processes related to the emotional state of students with ASC in classrooms. Research has shown that engagement increases when activities are tailored to personal needs and learners’ emotional states, and that effectiveness of the learning process is directly correlated with learners' engagement in learning activities. Our innovative digital tool will infer the level of engagement of students with autism, and predict and pre-empt ‘meltdown’ moments. Teachers, support staff, parents and carers can then use this information (presented via a well-designed dashboard) to:•Provide personalised learning pathways and support according to the specific needs of each child with autism.•Improve the understanding of autism both within school, and in the wider community.•Provide a learning environment free of emotional trauma. •Increase the likelihood that students with autism will make the academic and social progress that they should.•Decrease incidents of challenging behaviour, leading to improved mental wellbeing of individual students, and decreasing instances of absenteeism and bullying.•Improve access to teaching of academic, independent living, adaptive behaviours and social skills.•Help prevent secondary consequences of their difficulties such as anxiety disorders and depression.METHODS and RESULTS: Using mobile devices, the level of engagement in learning activities of students with autism, and their behavioural characteristics can be assessed in a non-intrusive manner using sensor data such as eye gaze, body posture and movements. Labels to train machine learning algorithms to predict engagement and challenging behaviour will be applied to these data, gathered by working with students with autism throughout the schools in our partnership. Once trained, our innovative user-friendly AI-tool (IO2/App) will allow teachers, parents, and carers to personalise learning based on individual needs, and pre-empt challenging behaviour. This App will be supported by an Online Database of latest autism-related methods (IO1), a Handbook (IO4) and a Pedagogical Framework (IO5) acting as a 'blueprint' for school staff to optimally introduce AI technology into their classrooms.CONTEXT - target groups & numbers- Teachers, teaching assistants, and special education needs coordinators in mainstream education, inclusive settings, and special educational settings (30/country).- Beneficiaries: students with ASC, and their families (100 in total).- Stakeholders: policy makers, pedagogical experts, schools, school authorities and their umbrella structures all over Europe. Service providers supporting students with ASC; Local education authorities at all levels, Associations for teachers and teacher unions.IMPACT - personalised learning solutions tailored according to the needs of students with autism, increased likelihood of academic and social progress, improved mental webbing - fewer incidents of challenging behaviour, and decreased absenteeism, smoother transition to the world of work.