project summary: Quality assurance has been prioritized by the federal legislation and national education strategy in both partner countries, Russia and Azerbaijan. Legal quality assurance is a complex, multi-layered system of interrelated elements. In fact, legal guarantees only legally formalize the established economic, social and other mechanisms to ensure the quality of education. In the aspects of QA of HEI, Internal Quality Assurance (IQA) plays essential role. However, there is a fixed understanding within a broad community and stakeholders in RU and AZ that the quality of education needs to be enhanced due to inconsistency in IQA procedures on institutional and national levels in general.Project IQAinAR aims to support enhancement and development of the IQA of HEIs of partner countries with international (EU) quality standards as benchmark as well as strengthening the HEIs towards local, regional and national policies and strategies implementation. The IQA system has very broad spectrum, and this project will focus on two main areas of IQA of HEI: teaching (teaching, learning and assessment) and teacher (educator, practitioner researcher) as teacher plays key role of QA of teaching.Additionally, IQA lies within a culture of quality awareness, critical review and of continue-improvement attitude and actions within HEI’s. This project is aiming at supporting the further quality culture development within HEI’s of partner countries. This project will develop IQA Indicators and assessment scale based on International (EU) standards and practice. After evaluation of implementation further training programmes will be developed with full information and training package. During the project lifetime, the partners will not only train the within their own institute but reach out to all interested parties in IQA of the partner countries and give the project after-life through its open online platform with full resources and experts in implementation of the IQA system.

The wider project objective is to enhance the quality of STEM Teacher training at partner universities in line with Bologna provisions and needs of knowledge economy. The specific project objectives are: to develop STEM Teacher Training Master programs in line with the Bologna provisions; to set up STEM resource centres ; to train teachers in new skills. The main project outputs are: Project policies, National STEM policies& practices, Integrated Master curriculum, 30 new course including 6 courses in English, innovative T&A methods specific for each module, 6 accredited Master programs in STEM Teacher Training; 6 STEM resource centres, retrained teachers, STEM ambassadors, 90 enrolled students, mobility schemes tested between EU and partner universities, Engagement program aimed at raisinf students' interest to STEM subjects. The achievements of outputs is reached through the implementation of 6 work packages. During the preparation phase the main project policies and plans will be devised and analysis of key employers' needs conducted. During the development phase main outputs are to be produced. Training of teachers will be done through the cascade model: first, the train the trainer program will be introduced for a small number of qualified teachers; then the trained trainers will transfer the skills to a wider circle of STEM stakeholders. All project outputs will be internally and externally evaluated. The project consortium consists of 10 universities from 4 EU countries and 6 universities from Russia and Kazakhstan. The associated partners will be actively involved in training and disseminating activities.

Health and well-being of citizens is of high priority on the social political agenda in Kosovo and Russia, as it is in the EU. However, the quality of health and social care systems in the two regions is often insufficient and, equally as in most European countries, jeopardized for sustainability.This leads to a pressing need to change the underlying systems and improve the quality. An important part of this change encompasses the manner of current education, the collaboration of health and well-being professionals, and research and innovation strategies to bridge this gap.The SUSWELL project modernizes health curricula of higher education institutes (HEI) from Pristina, Gjakova, Perm, St. Petersburg and Belgorod. It builds capacity through social innovation in order to improve and sustain health and well-being at community level.For it, SUSWELL is determined by an open, impact-driven multi-sector and multi-stakeholder approach of communities of practice (COP). These local COP seek for learning partnerships between HEI, non-for-profit representatives, businesses, public authorities, students and citizens. The outcomes of the local COP are co-created new solutions and practices that determine and lead to the development of innovative continuous professional development courses. These are aligned with European qualification standards and sustainably implemented in 5 HEI in Kosovo and Russia.SUSWELL is composed of 9 HEI and 6 social stakeholder organisations from 7 European countries who are embracing the complexity of health systems and accepting the need of co-creation to allow for social change. Other than traditional health initiatives, the consortium recognise the need for interaction of stakeholders across systems, professions and disciplines.SUSWELL will build increased institutional capacity of the targeted HEI, enhanced individual capacity of (future) health and well-being professionals, and greater social capacity in the related 5 local communities.