<< Objectives >>Address the cybersecurity skills gaps and help address the gender imbalance in cyber. This project will create a new upskilling pathway on cyber security that leads to recognised validation. It will develop the pathway comprised of an assessment, a learning element, and a validation through certification, and pilot this pathway with 100 individuals to provide them with the cyber skills needed for today's labour market.<< Implementation >>•Collection of existing training resources in cybersecurity in country•Analyse resources identify gaps, develop an assessment survey, •Consult and validate the pathway with cybersecurity experts•Complete the cybersecurity upskilling pathway that will support learners into entry-level jobs (in English)•Select learners to pilot the pathway in the project partners’ countries total 100 with 70% female•Organise a pilot and review the content and structure of the pathway.<< Results >>A new pathway that provides cyberskills needed in job markets100 individuals who have been trained, certified in these skillsimplement this pathways in digital learning course, accessible easier for all in national and international.

The project aimed to design and deliver a training programme specialising in Entrepreneurship and eCommerce. The course aimed at increasing the knowledge and competences of female individuals in the area of electronic commerce and business. The aim of the course is to improve the employment prospects or business opportunities of the participants.The course targets female individuals who would like to:-Increase their knowledge on the importance of e-commerce in today’s competitive environment;-have an opportunity to access a range of resources and tools specially made for women entrepreneurs who would like to start a business or have recently started a business;-Explore adopting e-commerce services as part of their product / service offering,-Use e-commerce to bring a new service/product closer to the market. In the framework of the Smart Women project, seven partners from European countries have created an innovative European Training Model, focused on women, aiming for encouraging entrepreneurship and putting business ideas into practice. The Smart Women Model combines online learning using online learning platforms and face to face training based on project collaboration, peer-learning, guidance, coaching and counselling. Also for each topic a quiz was developed to assess the participants at the end of each module.The following topics were included;1. Planning your Business2. Digital Marketing3. Creating Digital Content4. ICT and Online Security5. E-CommerceA thorough awareness and marketing campaign will was implemented to promote this training course vis-à-vis its importance for the growth of the European economy. This also included the branding of the project, the promotion of the course amongst potential participants, and the organization of conferences in identified partnering countries. To support the sustainability of the project, this component will also include the carrying out of ex-post surveys to establish the effectiveness of the training and be used to fine-tune the delivery of the programme.Development of an e-learning platform – in parallel with the delivery of the training programme, this project embarked on transforming the content of the course into a virtual learning environment (moodle). The e-learning platform will support the sustainability of the project. Having an online / blended course will reduce operational costs following the closure of the project and will also provide a more accessible learning environment for participants with different needs. Moreover, the e-learning platform will allow the course programme to be delivered following closure of the project. The activities were accompanied by 6 transnational project meetings where the expertise and ideas were exchanged, the observation of workplan and time schedule monitored as well as the next tasks and responsibilities agreed.The project consortium consisted of 7 partners, each of the partners brings to the project team a high-quality profile, multi-sectoral knowledge from similar previous initiatives and experienced working teams; all of which can be exploited for the successful project implementation. The Applicant, the Malta Communications Authority (MCA), has the remit to bridge the digital divide by stimulating and supporting citizens and business to embrace Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a key enabler to continued social and economic growth. All Digital is a European non-for-profit organisation (NGO) and a member based association with a central office in Brussels, Belgium. LIKTA is a member of Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Latvia, member of The Confederation of Employers of Latvia, as well as member of Pan- European associations. LIKTA holds the status of Educational institution and has a network of 31 E-competence centres around Latvia. Langas į ateitį provides basic ICT training courses for all citizens for free. More than 120.000 people graduated from distance/classroom training courses since 2003. Dedalo Foundation for the Development of the Information Society is a non-profit Foundation located in Tudela, the second most populated city of Navarra region in Spain. The Cyprus Computer Society (CCS) is an independent, professional, scientific, nongovernmental and non–for-profit organization seeking to improve and promote high standards amongst informatics professionals in Cyprus. Fundația EOS – Educating for an Open Society (EOS Romania – www.eos.ro) is a private, non-profit organization. Its main goal is to bridge the digital divide in Romania by helping people realise their full potential through the use of technology.

<< Objectives >>NoCode4BUSINESS involves 3 EU countries - Spain, Romania and Italy - with low digital literacy among adult working population. It aims to foster the uptake of digitalisation processes through the use of “low-code” and “no-code” tools among entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, and self-employed. Such resources are currently not well exploited, or not even known by many. The project will also be an opportunity to strengthen partners’ skills and their supporting role as adult education providers.<< Implementation >>NoCode4BUSINESS will implement the following activities:- Desk research on no-code state of the art and best practices, whose results will be summarised in a project Handbook.- Development of initial elements of training on no-code (3 short modules) for entrepreneurs. These will be co-created directly with end-users, to ensure they reflect their needs and expectations.- Pilot of modules and training on no-code and related digital skills to entrepreneurs in a transnational learning meeting.<< Results >>The project will advance entrepreneurs’ digital upskilling and provide them with new high-quality learning opportunities on no-code. It will improve the competences of partner trainers dealing with entrepreneurs and the business community. These will learn new innovative teaching methods, better guiding learners in digital transformation. Project results will be shared open-access to facilitate replication. Partners will foresee the organisation of local dissemination events at project end.

Background and aim of the projectDigital media is essential for communication and participation in today’s information society. Although senior citizens can benefit from digital opportunities, they are still the population group which is often not yet online. The project “Connect Seniors to the Digital World” (CSDW) therefore aims to empower senior citizens to use tablet computers independently and to benefit from this usage in their daily life.The objective of the project is to create a comprehensive training offer for staff and volunteers of institutions and sites where senior citizens can be supported in the use of tablet PCs. The need for such a training offer had been identified in the German project “Digital mobil im Alter” (Digital mobile in old age - https://digital-mobil-im-alter.de/), which lends tablet PCs to retirement homes and sheltered housing institutions and is conducted by the Digital Opportunities Foundation (SDC) in cooperation with Telefonica Germany since 2012. The Digital Opportunities Foundation is the coordinating organisation within this strategic partnership. The organisation aims to create the prerequisites needed for all people to become part of society and to shape it actively. It became clear that senior citizens need continuous support when using the mobile devices and that it is best when the support comes from people they know and that are around anyway – the institutions’ staff and volunteers. Additionally, the Association Rural Internet Access Points (VIPT) in Lithuania realized that there was a need to support seniors to enter the digital world. The goal of this organisation is to enable local individuals and institutions to build key elements of a modern and vibrant society through the promotion of new information and communication technologies (ICT), the expansion of resources that enable access to the Internet and through improving the quality of education. Two other strong and experienced partner organisations were involved in CSDW, the “Centre for the Innovation and Development of Education and Technology” (CIDET), Spain, and “Educating for an Open Society” (EOS), Romania. CIDET is focused on e-learning, understands technology as a tool, methodology and models. EOS aims to bridge the digital divide in Romania by helping people realise their full potential through the use of technology and works in a country, where the percentage of senior citizens who are not online is one of the highest throughout Europe.Project outputsThe four partner organisations conducted a small-scale study to collect information about: what senior citizens would like to do with tablet PCs; for what they need support; the training needs of the staff and volunteers of institutions for seniors (digital-seniors.eu/index.cfm/secid.265/key.242). 383 people above the age of 65 and 335 multipliers and 40 decision-makers of public education institutions (e.g. libraries) or institutions for senior citizens took part in the surveys that were conducted in January and February 2017. A course was created on the basis of the study’s results and on a blended learning approach (digital-seniors.eu/course). Within the project, the course was piloted with 47 participants in the four partner countries. The course included three face-to-face training sessions, two online workshops and eight weeks of self-learning on the online learning platform Edueca (www.edueca.eu, hosted by CIDET). The course, available in English, German, Spanish, Romanian, and Lithuanian on the online platform, was developed to contain all learning materials and content. Thus, it can stand alone after the duration of the project as a training offer for multipliers – without the need for face-to-face sessions - as well as a supplement for trainers of multipliers. Complementary to the course, the project partners developed guidelines, in which they evaluated and summarized the experiences from the first implementation of the blended learning course in four countries. The guidelines are available in the four partner languages and in English and provide good practices, convincing arguments and helpful recommendations to multipliers and decision-makers for setting up and conducting a training and supporting offer that empowers senior citizens in using tablet PCs in non-formal learning settings (digital-seniors.eu/index.cfm/secid.265/key.336). Furthermore, the partner consortium provided recommendations for organisations all over Europe about how to use the manifold project outputs to implement a training offer for multipliers in their countries, regions and cities (digitale-chancen.de/assets/includes/sendtext.cfm?aus=11&key=1569&pkey=2&dltype=2). In order to increase the attractiveness of the course, the videos that the participating multipliers recorded with their target group were published with English subtitles. To give a quick overview of the course, a handout with information from the main results was published in project languages.

<< Background >>Telepresence robots (TPRs) are not particularly novel, while their potential for supporting inclusion in the classroom is relatively obvious. For instance, the head of education of one of our school partners assumes that as many as 1-2 children per classroom would greatly benefit from being able to participate with a telepresence robot. Thus, the question arises why this technology does not yet belong to the standard equipment in schools already. One reason, we suspect, is that the obstacles have not been fully understood and that no practices exist to address them; for example, in one US school, researchers report on considerable resistance from some teachers and parents, which could be overcome by introducing the telepresence robot with this resistance in mind (Newhart & Olsen 2017). Now, possible obstacles are culture-specific, and the US model cannot simply be transferred to the EU. Furthermore, while telepresence robots offer social presence in the classroom to children who cannot otherwise participate at all, they do not afford social presence to the same extent as embodied class participation. For instance, Stoll et al. (2018) found the remote participants to be trusted less and to participate less in the joint activities; nevertheless, these problems could be mitigated if simple measures about the distribution of resources in the classroom were taken. Thus, recommendations as to how to organize classroom activities taking the remote participants into account could greatly facilitate their use for inclusion of challenged children in the classroom. A third problem may be that while all telepresence robots provide some autonomy to the child participating remotely in the classroom, the robots themselves differ greatly, and so far it is unclear which features support classroom inclusion. And finally, it is not exactly clear what the benefits are of participation by means of telepresence robots, and hence an evaluation of the effects of introducing this technology on the students' academic performance, as well as their health- and well-being will be carried out.What is missing are therefore concrete guidelines for schools in Europe on how to introduce telepresence robots into a school context, concrete recommendations for teachers on how to include children on telepresence robots into the classroom activities, design recommendations for robot manufacturers and a purchase guide for schools as to what robot functionalities they should pay attention to, and finally concrete teaching materials.<< Objectives >>The current project provides hands-on guidance on how to include children with health challenges remotely into the classroom activities; in order to do this, we first carry out a survey to understand the obstacles better, as well as teachers' and other stakeholders' hopes and fears. The first objective is thus to carry out a needs analysis across a large range of European countries.The second objective is to develop guidelines for schools on how to introduce TPRs into school organizations by taking all stakeholders into account and addressing possible resistance appropriately. The third objective is to develop concrete recommendations for teachers how to organize the inclusion of children who participate remotely using a TPR in their classrooms. These recommendations address how to create a sense of belonging and digital empathy and how to organize classroom activities to support inclusion, but also practical considerations, such as recommendations regarding seating arrangements, distribution of responsibilities etc. The fourth objective is to understand the needs of the children using the telepresence robots better and to inform the design of telepresence robot manufacturers regarding the specific requirements for the use of such robots in class. The fifth objective concerns the further use of such robots for intercultural encounters and collaborative foreign language learning based on joint project work on sustainability projects in different European countries. Such activities will enable children to get acquainted with children in other countries with whom they share an interest in environmental topics, where the collaboration motivates them to increase their foreign language skills and to develop a curiosity for other cultures. The overarching objective is thus to enable schools across Europe to introduce affordable telepresence robots into their classes while ensuring that they are really being used and don't end up in a closet.<< Implementation >>The main procedure in this project will be to develop best practice recommendations in an iterative design process of prototyping and testing, where the prototypes are developed in co-design workshops with stakeholders. We will thus start with participatory design activities in Denmark, which has a strong research tradition in this area, and then test these recommendations on a second set of schools, redesign these recommendations based on the collected feedback and then test and refine again, until the introduction of telepresence robots in new schools is going reliably smoothly. In parallel, we will develop and carry out a survey to reach out to a large range of stakeholders to identify their needs and possible obstacles. The redesign activities will be carried out jointly by all partners during the project meetings. The guidelines for the inclusion of children in the classroom using TRPs will rely on classroom observation, interviews and co-design activities. Simultaneously, we will carry out lab studies and field tests of certain measures to increase a sense of belonging and digital empathy. Furthermore, in lab studies and subsequent field tests, we will identify the technical requirements telepresence robots need to support inclusion in the classroom.Children's use of the TPRs will be investigated using think-aloud usability testing (Krug 2014) of the robots, as well as interviews and diary studies. Furthermore, lab and field studies will be carried out to inform robot manufacturers about the functionalities needed, as well as to support schools in finding the appropriate robot for their needs.We will furthermore develop teaching materials in co-design workshops with teachers and representatives from Youth for Environment Europe (YEE) on how to use the TPRs for intercultural exchange and joint project work on environmental topics across the countries involved. Finally, we will develop methods for measuring the effects of including children into the classroom by means of TPRs to provide parents, teachers and pupils with concrete information on how the use of TPRs in class impacts their performance in class.<< Results >>The general aim of the project is to promote the inclusion of children with health issues while stimulating innovative learning and teaching practices that allow for collaborative online international learning in the classroom. To achieve this, we support teachers and address possible obstacles and reservations by providing best practice recommendations that aim to facilitate the introduction of telepresence robots in the classroom. Furthermore, we aim to encourage intercultural exchange and motivate children to pursue multilinguality by engaging them in cross-cultural environmental project work. Specifically, the results will be:- a publication on our survey results on understanding the obstacles and factors influencing the acceptance of TPRs in school contexts;- a best practice recommendation on how to introduce robots into schools (organization level);- a best practice recommendation on how to put robots into classrooms (classroom level);- a best practice recommendation on increasing belonging & digital empathy;- a best practice recommendation on telepresence robot usability ;- a best practice recommendation on which robot functionalities are relevant for what purpose;- teaching material and a best practice recommendation on using telepresence robots for intercultural exchange and interaction in a foreign language.