Teaching foreign languages is currently a must in educational systems all over the world and having relevantly qualified teachers is taken for granted. Foreign language teachers, no matter how well qualified they are, over time they experience feeling of the need to upgrade their skills and competences because of not having a direct contact with the language they teach. Long time monitoring of the needs of foreign language teachers by teacher trainers in institutions involved has proved the vital need for refreshment courses the foreign language teachers look for. National CPD institutions rarely provide such courses and courses offered abroad are not accessible to everyone. Furthermore, current COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation even more complicated. That is why the consortium of project partners has decided to develop CPD e-courses for English teachers online.The objective of the project is to design four modules of e-courses for English teachers which can easily be combined to satisfy different professional needs of English teachers and their different time availability. Furthermore, such e-courses are accessible also to participants with special needs.The e-courses for English teachers will be designed and developed by the consortium of four partners from three countries – Aspekt Foundation and Teacher.sk from Slovakia, Ostrava University (OSU) from the Czech Republic and University of Bielsko-Biala (ATH) from Poland. Three of the partners (Aspekt Foundation, OSU, ATH) are experts in foreign language (English) course provision, two of them (OSU, ATH) in teacher training and one of them (Teacher.sk) is an IT expert. Two partners (OSU, ATH) are higher education institutions, one partner Aspekt Foundation is NGO, and Teacher.sk is SME. All project partners have highly qualified staff with long-term experience in the field.In order to achieve the above stated objectives, the project partners will make sure the relevant measures are taken within the life of the project and conditions for their fullfillment are created in their respective institutions.This task requires:-to design an innovative modular system of e-courses devoted to four areas identified by in-service teachers as a need for improvement: grammar competences, language skills, methodology of teaching English skills and competences, literature and intercultural knowledge upgrade;-to develop training materials in compliance with the designed modules and suggested e-courses, i.e. to design and agree the content and topics addressed in e-mode delivery;-to pilot developed e-courses for English teachers in preliminary summer training activities to get feedback from their participants in order to make necessary amendments in them;-to make the target groups aware of the project about the developed e-courses and make them accessible to those who are interested;-to design CPD e-course(s) for English teachers in compliance with national legislation and submit them for accreditation to the relevant legislative body,-to advertise the accredited e-courses for English teachers and run them by institutions involved in the project, and use them as examples of good practice for other institutions.The intellectual outputs developed within the life of the project will all be accessible on the project website not only for project partners but also for a wider community of in-service English teachers as well as will-be English teachers and other interested public also beyond the project life. They will serve as the basis for multiplier events (E1 – E3) with project stakeholders who are expected to use it directly or disseminate the information about the e-courses to staff and experts involved in teaching foreign languages. The developed materials will have a considerable impact on the target group of English teachers as to their language and methodology competences and skills and self-confidence and quality of learning outputs of their students. It is expected that the materials will be used long after the project life when the institutions involved in the project will advertise and run the accredited CPD e-courses for English teachers and when even other stakeholders responsible for CPD of teachers will consider the materials displayed on the project website and methodology used for their development as examples worth to follow and develop similar e-courses for teachers of other subjects.

<< Background >>Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently one of the fastest-growing areas, which shows a growing demand for experts with advanced knowledge and the ability to learn and discover new approaches. Each country needs to respond and adapt to the changes that the implementation of artificial intelligence brings. Moreover, this trend must be addressed first and foremost by the educational institutions that train future leaders and employees in this field.Universities must deal with the consequences of AI mystification in the media and the complexity of the issues, which cause that only a tiny proportion of students consider a career in AI. Each of the universities involved in the project has courses focused on artificial intelligence in its study programs. The content and structure of the courses reflect the university background, the history of the respective study programs and staffing. It is necessary to reconsider the form and structure of the educational content to increase the number of stakeholders interested in AI careers. The implementation of the project provides an opportunity to obtain international feedback and exchange experience and best practices in teaching AI. Simultaneously, the training of knowledgeable and skilled students will lay the foundations of the joined research in AI and enable project stakeholders to collaborate and solve research issues.AI activities can contribute to the prestige of the partners, which increases their chances of gaining more and better students in the future. An essential part of the project is sharing the educational content of selected application domains of artificial intelligence. While each of the universities is focused on a specific area of AI, they can enrich other partners in natural language processing, cybersecurity, data pre-processing or learning analytics. SME partners will have the opportunity to expand their experience in AI, which will give them a competitive advantage in the future. At the same time, the project verifies and develops the processes of the technology transfer, development of new digital skills, implementing large-scale systems and using open interactive educational resources.The target group of university students expects an effective acquisition of knowledge and practical skills, emphasising simplification. In other words, they expect to learn highly specialized knowledge and skills in AI following their habits to be ready for a career in the field of AI (regardless of whether they finally choose it). Therefore, increasing the level of highly specialized knowledge and skills of students who consider or have already decided on a career in AI will be realised using a work-based learning strategy with elements of active-based, collaborate-based and problem-based learning. These approaches prepare them for lifelong learning, which in IT, even with excellent university training, usually begins right after graduating from university.<< Objectives >>Artificial intelligence will be one of the fastest-growing areas in the coming years, creating many high value-added jobs.The project aims to implement an educational model to ensure the development of future AI experts' highly specialized skills and competencies and verify its effectiveness. The implementation of the model can demystify the concept of AI and increase the interest of the target group in a career in artificial intelligence, which is currently only a rare choice of students' professional career in computer science study programs. Simultaneously, the development of knowledge and skills will help to deploy solutions based on artificial intelligence.Achieving the objectives will contribute to the development and improvement of higher education, which should ensure a level of digital skills of young people that will provide them with the widest possible opportunities for employment.The project develops digital preparedness, advanced digital skills, and available capacities, using digital technologies not only as a goal (mastery of AI technology) but also as a means of ensuring effective education using state-of-the-art approaches.The project will create high-quality educational resources in a user-friendly online virtual environment to respect privacy and ethical standards. The chosen strategy of inclusion and diversity implemented in a virtual learning environment enables education for disabled users through created digital courses and resources. Any number of repetitions is allowed during learning, and educators are positively motivated to achieve partial goals. At the same time, the created educational content will be freely available via the Internet for those interested, regardless of cultural, social, geographical or economic barriers.<< Implementation >>Working groups will be created within the preparatory phase of the project to ensure the creation of the educational content of individual courses. The requirements for new modules of the educational system will be defined based on the jointly prepared structure of the educational content. They will be developed subsequently. The users of the educational system without experience with the education system will be trained at the beginning of the project. All project committees will be established at the first transnational meeting to ensure the management, development of intellectual outputs and results dissemination.Subsequent development of the content of the planned project courses always consists of content development, pilot deployment, updating content based on analysis of students' behaviour and feedback, deployment after pilot modifications and finally, final content modifications. This cycle of development of the educational course usually lasts 18-24 months, while intensive content development takes the first 6-9 months.The level of obtained highly specialized skills of graduates and the level of knowledge in AI depend on educational content quality. They can increase the student's engagement in a career in AI, so it is necessary to pay increased attention to them.The content development is divided into two stages due to the complexity and scope of the AI. The first five courses start to be developed in the first year of the project, while the complete deployment is expected in the summer semester of the second year of the project. Partial deployment focused on verifying the selected parts of the courses or virtual environment will be implemented within the running courses as soon as possible. The development of the second series of outputs will begin in the second year of the project, when the first courses will be deployed. Partial experimental deployment (selected and prepared tasks and content) will be implemented in the second year.The courses will be designed to master the content without the support of the teacher. Therefore, freely available resources will be available to any applicant. Consequently, they can again increase the number of people interested in a career in AI and support skills development outside the target group.The final study will be prepared after the pilot run of the second series of the courses, and it will present a summary of project results and best practices for teaching AI.Multiplication events are focused on promoting the created courses and developing a virtual learning environment because the content represents the most suitable project output.Transnational meetings will be used to evaluate the status of the project and decide on the further direction.<< Results >>The main output of the project is an educational model for building highly specialized skills at the university stud programs focused on AI. The model will increase the interest of IT students in artificial intelligence by better understanding and mastery of educational content by students, increasing the level of highly specialized knowledge and skills of graduates and developing students' vocational and lifelong learning habits. The model will consist of methodologies, summarise the experience of the project consortium and provide examples of good practice in addition to the educational content.Several courses focused on artificial intelligence will be designed and developed within the project based on sharing partners' experiences to a suitable form, which can be implemented in the Priscilla educational platform. Priscilla educational platform currently promotes interactivity and learning by applying approaches that consider the behaviour and expectations of the current generation of students. Newly developed modules needed to teach artificial intelligence courses will provide immediate feedback and support students’ projects in artificial intelligence.The created educational content will consist of courses for teaching prerequisites of AI, courses for teaching basics AI (data preparation, knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence, machine learning) and courses for teaching application domains of AI (natural language processing, educational data, cybersecurity ). Created courses with interactive learning content will be designed to fully correspond to the communication and educational habits of the young generation and the structure of the virtual learning platform.Educational data will be collected within several rounds of courses, which will be used for identifying students’ behaviour, problem areas in the educational content and teaching process. Applied procedures and methodologies will be published in indexed scholar publications.An optimized educational model combining interactive content, methodologies, and assignements to develop highly specialized skills and competencies of future IT professionals in artificial intelligence will increase the scope and quality of skills and knowledge of all stakeholders. At the end of the project, there will be a methodology for creating educational content focused on AI, summarized examples of good practices for education in AI and education methodology based on active learning with preparation for lifelong learning.

The digitisation of society and the automation of many processes bring new opportunities and new types of jobs. The number of people employed in IT is constantly growing. However, employers in all EU countries are announcing a growing shortage of IT specialists in software development that educational institutions cannot meet.The project aimed to design and implement a sustainable educational model ensuring the development of highly specialised skills and competencies of future IT experts in programming and software development. The model contributes to minimising the number of students with educational problems and increases the level of knowledge from introductory computer science courses, which represent a necessary prerequisite for increasing the overall level of highly specialised knowledge and skills of graduates. The educational model implemented in the form of a modern micro-learning platform Priscilla (https://priscilla.fitped.eu) with the support of automated evaluation of student assignments and gamification elements leads to better readiness of students for lifelong learning by applying selected elements of work-based-, collaborative- and problem-based learning in courses.The primary target group of the project are the students of accredited IT study programs of universities, who were involved in the project activities through innovations implemented directly in the educational process. Special attention was paid to the involvement of doctoral students in order to prepare them for the job of a teacher and to enable them to gain experience in working in an international project team. Simultaneously, the secondary school teachers and students were involved in the project through multiplier events, as well as students’ programming competitions held at the universities participating in the project.The Priscilla platform has become an integral part of teaching at the universities participating in the project in study programs to train computer science professionals, teachers and related fields of study. More than 1,700 individual student accounts are registered on the platform. Students have actively participated in most of the created 26 micro-learning courses (3,300 student courses).In terms of the created educational content, the platform provides more than 4,330 micro-learning units, 2,200 automatically evaluated programs, 180 topics in courses based on the WBL strategy and 562 solved student projects from practice within the whole model.The innovativeness of the project lies in the implementation and verification of the model of education based on modern approaches such as micro-learning, gamification, work-based learning and others, which have so far penetrated formal education only sporadically and unsystematically. In accordance with the priorities of the call, activities were built and implemented in the project, which supported the development of innovative teaching methods and pedagogy, created and developed digital educational materials and tools. The procedures applied to achieve the results are innovative and so far in this combination have not been systematically sufficiently explored. During the project realisation, 18 university textbooks were published to acquire knowledge and skills in programming and software development. Simultaneously, several pieces of research were realised aimed at verifying the benefit of the approaches used for the training of IT professionals using the created Priscilla platform and the project outputs. The research confirmed the assumptions and fulfilment of the project objectives. The architecture, experience and partial results were presented in more than ten articles in indexed journals and conference proceedings.The main benefit of the project is the implementation and validation of a two-level model of education. The first level is based on gaining essential knowledge and experience through interactive content and automated evaluation of source codes for different programming languages using an educational platform allowing personalisation and individual approach to each student. The second level transfers responsibility for one's own learning process to the student by forcing him/her to acquire new skills and knowledge through real assignments in a typical way for lifelong learning necessary for his/her professional advancement in IT after graduating from university.Creating a catchment network and a reduction in the number of students at risk of educational failure, as well as achieving a better average evaluation through educational innovation, can be considered the most crucial impact of the project on the target group in the short term. It can be expected to reach a higher level of IT knowledge of students for the labour market and a better level of preparation for lifelong learning together with an increase in the competitiveness of universities in the long-term horizon.

<< Objectives >>The project responds to the current need to incorporate interdisciplinary learning in education in order to prepare high school students and university students for real life and broaden their understanding of the world. It aims at providing teachers with learning materials with interdisciplinary content so that the teachers would not see time investment and lack of resources as major challenges and they would have resources of high quality ready to be used by them.<< Implementation >>The project contains activities related to different aspects of interdisciplinary learning. These include preparation of digital interdisciplinary learning materials of high quality, validation of materials in a unique international setting of COIL in which students and teachers of high schools and universities will collaborate, and creation of the virtual resource centre in which students and teachers will share their experience with interdisciplinary learning.<< Results >>Major project results will be four digital course books of interdisciplinary lessons which would interconnect the subjects of literature, art & culture, civic education and history. The newly designed materials will be validated in eight cohorts of COIL in which students and teachers of all partner institutions will be involved. The third major result will be the virtual resource centre where students and teachers will interact and share their knowledge.