<< Background >>The Open Minds consortium has identified a need for radically inclusive and innovative approaches to education in the Covid era and beyond. These approaches must support the upskilling of all young people, foster resilience and address societal challenges at both a local and international level, and allow for the creation of an inclusive and transnational European network of creative youth. They must tackle the challenges of travel restrictions and health precautions while allowing for the transnational meeting of minds for which Erasmus was created. It is particularly critical that no perspective and no contribution is excluded when addressing the increasingly urgent societal challenges facing Europe’s young people, and so the consortium has embraced the strategy of ‘radical inclusion’, rather than simply following a compliance approach to making participation accessible. Radical inclusion ensures participation by those whose voices often go unheard - particularly those young people living with disabilities, and whose contribution is often excluded or overlooked. The societal, environmental, political, economic and technological issues facing Europe all have an important cultural dimension, and it is by centering culture and creativity, as well as the affordances of new technologies to solve the issues preventing inclusion.<< Objectives >>Open Minds creates a transnational European youth network of creative problem solving, addressing diversity, social innovation, inclusion and accessibility. The project innovates a methodology to synchronise young minds from diverse European locations and the Western Balkans region around grand challenges. By co-creating simultaneously, both in person and online, young people act in synchrony, bounce ideas back and forth across cultural, geographical and economical divides, and co-create solutions in real time. Open Minds does not simply provide tools for online learning, but cross-fertilises the learning experience for young people across Europe. These moments of revelation about each other’s contribution to solving challenges propose a new mission for Erasmus: Synchronising bright minds across Europe.The consortium of the Open Minds project sees the cultural core value – creativity – as the driver of change that can support and develop local communities in response to grand challenges. By developing an innovative methodology and technological infrastructure for working with young people in the Covid era, Open Minds explores both local and international creative collaboration to address social inclusion, resilience, upskilling and sustainable development. Open Minds aims to shift the core focus from physical travel to synchronising young minds from diverse European locations around great societal challenges. The objective of the Open Minds project is to create the foundations for development of highly inclusive local ecosystems in Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Croatia and Albania by innovating methodology for radical inclusion of disabled youth through arts, culture and technology.<< Implementation >>In order to achieve the objective, the partners will build upon their extensive experience in using technology, arts and culture as a means of achieving social inclusion for different excluded groups in order to facilitate radical inclusion for young, creative disabled people. The project includes a co-creation process with young people with disabilities to develop a methodology, transferable pedagogical toolkit and learning path through practical collaborative innovation and case study research aimed at identifying exclusion factors in local communities and collection of digital assets used for presenting identified societal challenges. The developed educational path will be tested on 200 young people and 30 youth workers with a background in arts and culture and/or technology and 28 young disabled creatives. During the education, young people and youth workers will define 30 challenges for which they will build social innovations that address issues of inclusion and accessibility in their local ecosystems during the Creative Innovation Labs (CIL). For the CIL, local participants will be involved physically in one place (one Satellite Lab) and will have a direct window between the simultaneous Satellite Labs in Umeå, Zagreb, Tampere, Tirana and Porto. Participants will jointly experience inspirational talks and brainstorming session, and innovation building teams will be self-organised by interest rather than location, allowing for teams to gather either locally (all team members in the same Satellite Lab) or remotely (members from 2 or more Satellite Labs). The environment for testing the developed methodology will be instrumental to the multinational collaborative co-creation and co-design that supports the development of inclusive and accessible local communities. Innovations created during the CIL will be further developed in the incubators hosted by partner organisations with ongoing remote collaboration of young people, youth workers and young people with disabilities. It is expected that 20 innovations will be developed through a process of mentorship in order to be used to achieve radical inclusion of youth in the local ecosystem. The developed methodology will be evaluated and its piloting in 5 local ecosystems will be explained in detail in a Best Practice Rulebook. The aim of the Rulebook is to be adopted and used by newly established Satellite Labs in local ecosystems to extend the impact of the project far beyond the reach of the partnership and funding.<< Results >>Open Minds is created to be highly re-usable and its impact extends far beyond the tangible outputs of the consortium activities. It is designed as a multiplier for social inclusion, transferable innovation methodology and toolkit for local community ecosystems, a generator for new business ideas and learning paths for young people as well as an engine for social cohesion and resilience in Europe and between the EU members and the Western Balkans region. Open Minds is a methodology that can be shared and used for radical inclusion to address geographical and social obstacles and to both reveal and tackle the structural and systemic nature of a wide range of disabilities. In addition, while the methodology builds on the affordances of available new technologies, it is not dependent on any particular technology. Rather, it is equally applicable to existing technologies and to technologies that are yet to be developed. It is an innovation methodology that brings together diverse creative minds in a way that iterates on its form, and so improves and adapts in every context it is deployed. Open Minds is not imagined as a two year project in the traditional sense that would see it come to an end after the funded activities. It is proposed as a two year development and delivery of a methodology that can be shared, built upon and grown long beyond the life of the project.

STEM for ALL - STEFORA is a result of the self-as the results from the on-going STINT project funded by the Swedish Government, where diversity and gender equality are identified as topics of interest aiming at sharing knowledge and experiences in terms of frameworks and empirical studies to investigate Generation Z’s enrolment and involvement in the development of STEM. The on-going (STINT) project was designed by LNU and RIT (AUK), for starting a long-term collaboration in academic development with RIT (AUK) and with other HEIs in Kosovo and the region, for supporting internationalization and enhancement of HEIs’ STEM capacities. A part of the core activities of the project are designed to address the findings of self-assessments and strategic meetings between LNU and beneficiary HEIs in Kosovo and Albania from December, 2021. The other focus is to take advantage of the Committee for Women's RIghts and Gender Equality (FEMM) Study produced by the European Parliament. As such, STEFORA’s is designed with a holistic approach around three wide/general project objectives: (1) digital citizenship focusing on mitigating institutional barriers, (2) apply universal design principles in formal and non-formal learning activities including premises, and (3) adopt norm critical approaches to raise cultural awareness and foster gender sensitive education, in the target countries specific to STEM engagement for women.

Cross-border student and staff mobility as key peace-building instrument among European countries and driver for the circulation of ideas, innovation and graduates is politically enticing. Hence, student and staff mobility in Europe is increasing partially as a result of such mobility promotion and funding instruments as ERASMUS+. Yet, such growth is shown to be unbalanced. The most worrying is that students from unprivileged socio-economic backgrounds are less inclined to student mobility than students from better-off socio-economic backgrounds, thereby turning ERASMUS+ to some sort of social selection mechanism. The same studies suggest that the social segregation of certain Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) contributed to the unbalanced mobility pattern and call for more equal mobility uptakes across universities through tailored incentives. Empirical research among the project’s partners indicates that reduced mobility uptake in remote and socially segregated HEIs also corresponds with lesser capacities of International Relations Offices (IROs).This project responds to the European Commission’s commitment to reinforce ERASMUS+ programme “in particular by reaching out to increasing numbers of people with fewer opportunities,” as those served by the type of HEIs mentioned above.The project, titled “ROAMING - Strengthening International Staff&Student Mobility Offices in the West Balkans,” aims at reducing the unbalanced international mobility uptake of remote and less privileged HEIs in the West Balkans by strengthening the capacity of their International Relations Offices. To this end, we are working to establish a consortium with a mix of experienced and inexperienced Higher Education Institutions from the West Balkans in matters related to ERASMUS+ from Albania, Kosovo* and Motenegro, willing to cooperate with an experienced university from an ERASMUS member country and another university from an associated country, North Macedonia.

The general objective of this project is to contribute in the development of the research and innovation capacities of HEIs in Albania and Kosovo by enhancing their institutional capabilities, staff skills and networking.For both countries, improved capacities are needed in terms of the HEIs research management and adopted methodologies, but most importantly a closer cooperation of the universities with other actors in the innovation ecosystem, especially local actors as businesses and international partners. The cause for poor performance in both countries, in terms of innovations, lays not only in the economic structure of Albania and Kosovo (dominantly composed by SMEs), but also on the underdeveloped capacities of the HEIs, and the weak links they have developed locally and internationally. The needs analysis for both countries reveals two major fields for action:- The need to improve the HEIs capacities for research and innovation,- The need to foster the links and cooperation among the actors in the innovation ecosystem.As a result, the project seeks to support the development of capacities for research and innovation in intra and inter institutional level.The foreseen outputs can be summarized as follows:- Newly established/ strengthened research and innovation support structures- Modernized teaching and mentoring methodologies that enhance students’ capacities for research - Trained researchers and managers - Research quality indicators developed- Enhanced International linkages through interdisciplinary research groupsThe short term impact is to have increased capacities for research in the HEIs participating in the project, as well as generate synergy and a stronger cooperation among them.The expected long term impact is improved research performance in quantitative and qualitative terms.

Traffic Safety Culture (TraSaCu) aims at developing a cultural approach in road traffic safety research and accident prevention. Traditional approaches to traffic safety shall be complemented by a cultural perspective which has emerged recently in safety research and prevention. Safety culture has been identified as an important factor of road safety as it helps understanding and explaining the typical patterns of risk perception and risk taking that prevail in different national, regional or local traffic systems as well as their relationships with numbers and forms of accidents. A weak safety culture produce higher numbers of accidents which are more severe. A strong safety culture helps reducing the number of accidents as well as mitigating their severity. It strengthens safety relevant attitudes and behaviour and it is also a condition for making road safety measures more effective. According to a working definition of the US Department of Transportation Safety Council (US DOT), traffic safety culture is defined as the shared values, actions, and behaviours that demonstrate a commitment to safety over competing goals and demands. However, a unified concept of safety culture still does not exist. Therefore, the project will elaborate an empirically grounded and theoretically adequate concept of traffic safety culture, based on this definition by conducting a number of case studies of different traffic safety cultures across Europe. It focuses on the safety cultures that emerge under different institutional, demographic and topographical conditions and their influence on the numbers and forms of accidents. Research focuses on the culturally mediated interaction between traffic participants and their environment in terms of the cultural patterns of risk taking and risk perception. It also looks at those cultural elements that can be changed easily in order to improve road safety of the investigated traffic systems.