'Re-think Heritage!' project was brought into being as a transnational partnership to answer the great need for new, innovative practices in the education of heritage management and protection of monuments. The partnership is made up of institutions of various profiles including non-governmental associations, a university, a municipal department and a web development enterprise, all being active in the field of heritage protection or in the development of digital-form educational materials.The project aims to assemble a Digital Handbook of European scope which operates with illustrative and interactive features for providing clearer understanding on complex technical details of traditional building technologies and on the debatable questions of historic preservation of monuments, while collecting together the most important principles and instruments of heritage management, their development throughout history and showcasing best practice examples in the management of heritage protected areas and monuments. This educational tool is also planned to be paired with a structured learning management system allowing distance learning technologies for the digitally elaborated training course of the project. The project initiatives will be also supported by the downloadable print-form version of the handbook and a guidance material explaining the usage of the e-learning platform and facilitating the implementation of the course material to the curricula of any educational frameworks of VET and universities throughout Europe.The project targets not only learners of architecture and heritage management studies, but also practising professionals of these occupations, who will be able to use the online accessible materials in their everyday work, while dealing with building contractors and craftspersons or negotiating with developers or decision-makers, using the Handbook as an essential store of knowledge, that can also help the reasoning process through its highly illustrative graphics and interactive methodologies. Further target group of the project are homeowners and lease holders of heritage protected properties who can get access to important but easily understandable knowledge for the proper and authentic maintenance of their homes.It is expected that the innovative and digital features of the new training materials will contribute to the greater acknowledgement of heritage management by providing more relevant and useful knowledge for architects and heritage professionals than that any former learning materials could previously offer, attracting a wider audience of the local communities and convincing more decision-makers on different levels about the importance of modern heritage protection of outstanding quality.

<< Objectives >>The main goal of the project is to provide a learning material of online access, that can help adult learners, architects and heritage managers to learn about the effective and spectacular realisation of photogrammetric surveys. The summary of best practice examples will include the possible ways of using the collected dataset for the realistic and precise representation of the surveyed buildings to popularise the most-up-to date methodologies and to ease the access to these solutions.<< Implementation >>The basis of the project is the realisation of 4 camps in rural, disadvantaged regions, where photogrammetric surveys will be carried out together with local associated partners representing learners with fewer opportunities.The selected monuments will be representatives of vernacular acrhitecture including a timber framed barn, a hayrack, a belfry and a stone house. Partners of the programme will assemble 3D materials and educational contents based on the architectural research and survey.<< Results >>The project will result-in an Educational Platform & Homepage to share all further project outputs. The great potential laying in photogrammetry will be portrayed through 2D architectural drawings and 3D renditions of the surveyed buildings in the form of interactive spherical panoramas and 3D models. The main project result will be the Digital Handbook which will summarise the theories and followable methodologies of the surveys using also interactive quizzes to measure the gained knowledge.

'E-Academy of Building Trades - E-learning Platform of Traditional Craftsmanship' is a transnational project answering the great need for new, innovative approaches in the education of the craftsmanship related to traditional building methods. The partnership is made of university faculties, adult education providers of building professions, non-governmental organisations being active in the heritage sector and an architectural design studio with the common aim to assemble new, digital type of learning materials helping to revive and maintain these professions as lifetime occupations.The project primarily targets young people and low-skilled or low-qualified adults, offering them an online accessible, open-access distant learning educational platform that hosts training courses of disappearing architectural professions. The series of shortfilms teach practical skills, hands-on expertise in a structured and illustrative way, providing easily perceivable knowledge for the learners who can be part of a virtual learning community, interacting with the providers of the tutorials and with other students, filling tests about the topics of the courses and receiving certificates at the end of each successful training. The e-learning platform is designed in a way to be able to host further training courses after the project's lifetime, being open for further partners, stakeholders and contributors with identical aims. The learning resources can later be combined with any practical trainings, workshop activities to strengthen the effectiveness of the gained knowledge, skills and competences. The learning modules can be also integrated to existing trainings of adult education or VET providers or even to special maintenance programmes which help the homeowners to take care of their properties on their own. To help all these initiatives special guidance materials will be assembled to facilitate the continuous further extension of the online academy and to ease the implementation of the video courses to the curricula of the different training institutions throughout Europe. Additionally to the realisation of the project outputs the European Festival of Traditional Building Trades will be organised in all partner countries to popularise the results and the craftsmanship essential for maintaining monument buildings and for the continuation of sustainable architectural solutions for the benefit of the future generations.

BIM is the maximum expression of what the new technologies can give us and how we can include BIM training in a transversal way in the different formations and specializations, from Architecture and Engineering to Business Management or Art...yes because technologies like BIM can be applied in Art; rehabilitation of historical buildings, of artistic spaces or recovery of the historical heritage. Is it being introduced into university education? University professors and department Managers and Director are aware that the BIM should be known and included in a large part of university curricula and students should leave with this training.The collaborative leadership of the BIM is aware about the main task of the BIM systema and network: implement the social and collaborative environment for the community to provide the data flow. If the students understand it and know it, we can build a useful network sistem in the european universities. The aim of this project is to address the redefinition of a new paradigm related to the training of students and professors that are working and studing on topics related to Specialities related with BIM use. The knowledge of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is the big opportunity that we try to analyze how to introduce in one transversal way in different university areas and related labour market.

APPROACH has emerged from a multi-sector cooperation containing heritage, architectural and cultural organisations, municipality with architectural and media enterprises and a VET institution with media classes. The partners involved are summarised in section 2.1. The main objective of this transnational consortium is to assemble an online learning platform as an open educational resource, targeting firstly architectural, art historian and urban analyst students and, in parallel, media and web designer students in VET and on other levels. The main output of the programme is a 4-piece collection of interactive 3D city maps showing the centres of Edinburgh, Granada, Budapest and Lublin as non-formal educational tools. The creation of the animated models is based on a scientifically carried-out historical and urbanistic research collecting all available source materials, like old maps and archive texts to be able to rebuild and represent the selected time periods of the cities - from their foundation to modern times. This approach gives the possibility to freely explore the urban environment in both space and time, collecting knowledge about the monuments and urban textile through interaction with the models. Moreover, each “time map” marks significant periods of social and political changes, which drove architectural and spatial changes. Our aspiration is to provide APPROACH users with an opportunity to compare how and where each city evolved in different historic phases. We are proud that the APPROACH online platform is a free of charge, intuitive, and accessible. The development of the “time maps” was managed by a comprehensive methodology that involved historic research, transformation of raw data to 3D models, ongoing verification of outputs, and the compilation of a learning narrative. The project was delivered by four groups: researchers, modellers, project managers/coordinators, and students. Each modelled city had its research team collecting historic information, turning them into visual templates that would then be passed onto modelling teams based in Budapest and Cluj. In the next stage the modellers created 3D “white models”; their accuracy was verified by the researchers before the entire model received textures and was turned into the “interactive content”, which involved a fair amount IT engineering. A vast amount of historic information was collected throughout the process. The research teams used a wide range of sources including: maps, drawings, paintings, photos, and texts. “Info-boxes” provide narrative to the models, containing the most relevant learning information. They redirect to external sources for those seeking more detail. Some of the most interesting research discoveries can be found in this comprehensive study, which binds together all outputs of the project, summarising the steps of the product-oriented co-operation with the architectural and media enterprises. Its main purpose is to promote the project ideas among VET institutions and relevant stakeholders and in this way to contribute to the creation of further educational material similar to the products of this project. To help the same initiative, a series of video tutorials and text descriptions was also produced to teach the creation of 3D interactive contents. The production of this online material is connected with a training programme, in which blended mobility of VET students took place combining virtual involvement with short-term physical mobilities. As a part of the training, the media and web designer students were involved in learning, testing and therefore the creation of the final resource. The chapters of the material are to teach useful techniques and methods about 3D modelling, composing animations and programming interactive functions in co-operation with for-profit firms. In this way the training leads to the recognition of the latest trends of CAD, BIM and game development technologies, providing knowledge and competencies with remarkable labour market relevance. With different techniques and target groups, all the outputs of the project provide working models and pathways for the easily intelligible visualisation of urban environment and monuments as well as for the integration of digital competences to the development of further educational resources.Following a series of public meetings in all partner cities we have confidence in the educational value of the project’s outputs and their future potential for development. It is important to stress that the project involved design students from the Riga School of Art who actively participated in the project delivery and engaged with professional modellers and researchers. The educational aspect of the project is also represented by a series of online modelling tutorials, which can be found on our beautiful website.