Context/background of the projectIn the light of the 2011 EU Modernisation Agenda's key policy issues providing guidance to Member States and HEIs on how to support modernisation efforts of HEIs in order to maximise the contribution of the higher education sector to Europe’s growth and jobs. The Modernisation Agenda states that enabling better working conditions including transparent and fair recruitment procedures, introduction of incentives for HEIs to invest in continuous professional development for their staff, and better recognition and reward of teaching and research excellence is essential to ensure that Europe produces, attracts and retains the highly competent and motivated academic staff it needs. Thus adapting internal quality assurance mechanisms at the HEIs to include evidence-based human resource management processes would contribute to the efficiency of the governance of the HEIs which will help them to fulfil their role in society and contribute to Europe's prosperity. ObjectivesObjectives of the project are aligned with the following horizontal (sectoral) priorities of the Erasmus + programme in 2016:Supporting the implementation of reforms in line with the 2011 EUStrengthening the recruitment, selection and induction of EducatorsSustainable investment, performance and efficiency in education and trainingIn the light of the mentioned policy priorities at the European level, the project has aimed to achieve four general objectives: • To improve the organizational development, efficiency and effectiveness of HEIs as well as to increase its global competitiveness. •To encourage and improve Higher Education Institution’s contribution to economic growth and social development by enhancing the quality and relevance of human capital development in higher education. • To stimulate excellence of European HEIs staff through appropriate academic human resources management. The benchmarking tool constructed as an Open Educational Resource (OER) will enable European HEIs to use it as a mean of continuous improvement of their HRM system and increase of their competitive ability. • To foster further development of EHEA by adding to existing communication channels and mutual exchange of sound practices. Number and profile of participating organisationsThe project has been carried out by five partner organization from three countries – Croatia, Austrian and Finland. The choice of academic partners from three countries was motivated by their significant role in the international and national higher education systems and in policy or strategic developments (Danube University Krems, Austria and University of Tampere, School of Management, Finland, both of which are providers of Master’s Degree Programme in Research and Innovation in Higher Education (MARIHE)) and by the criterion of substantial expertise in the field of HRM as well as international project-based experience and good practice (Croatian partners - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of University of Rijeka and Algebra University College).Description of undertaken main activitiesThe main project activities have been grouped into 5 working packages (WP) as will be explained in detail in section 5.1Results and impact attainedThe project have achieved immediate impact on the project partners and participants from other HEIs as its target group in terms of enhanced awareness of the significance of the HRM function for the internal quality system of the HEIs, which is also a requirement of the Part 1 of the ESG standards. At the system level an increase of the understanding the importance of human resource management in HEIs has been observed in all three countries during multiplier events as well as following the events as a number of HEIs informed the ASHE to have institutionalized a function of vice dean for human resources. Also, the results of the project our complementary to the policy measure Program financing of public higher education institutions in 2018/2019. - 2021./2022. instituted by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education with the aim of achieving a result-based funding of teaching, scientific and artistic activities. Furthermore, creation of benchmark tool that enables all HEIs to evaluate their HRM processes has been widely disseminated among HEIs and the results collected will be a source of evidence-based position for developing policy measures at both institutional and sectoral level.

The skills required to achieve technological innovation are crucial in developing Europe’s competitiveness and innovative capacity. The modern economy depends on individuals with the ability to design new business models and to seize opportunities making best use of new technologies. High-tech talent is scarce and the number of vacancies for high-tech leaders or e-leaders is increasing drastically. Open Educational Resources (OER) and online learning have the potential to reduce the “time to market” for e-leadership education and training, allowing also for greater accessibility by different user segments, such as adults at work.The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the digital transformation of education that raised the major need to enhance the digital readiness of institutions and imposed some immediate responses to be given. On one hand, the crisis emphasised the potential of online teaching and learning, but it also revealed huge gaps in the delivery capacities of educational institutions as well as gaps in the capacity of individuals to actively participate and take up what is being offered. The e-Leadership Trainer Accelerator project (acronym eLead Speed) upskilled educators to improve their ability to exploit innovative teaching methods and design e-leadership curricula based on digital learning materials and tools, including OER, collaborative online learning and the e-CF. eLead Speed applied the e-leadership concept itself to speed up the spread of innovative educational practices on e-leadership in the era of the e-leaders – the digital era. The project built on the results of several EU initiatives and projects such as Le@d3.0 Academy knowledge alliance and the family of EU initiatives on e-leadership skills. The consortium was composed of three Bulgarian institutions, being respectively a HEI (NBU), an Excellence Centre for ICT industry competitiveness (ESI CEE) and the National Coalition for Digital Jobs in Bulgaria (DNA), plus two HEIs from Croatia (Algebra) and Germany (MUAS), a business school (ISTUD) and an SME specialised in digital learning (Gruppo Pragma) from Italy. As such, the partners represent both the Higher Education (NBU, MUAS and Algebra) and the tertiary Vocational Education and Training (ESI CEE, ISTUD and Gruppo Pragma) sectors. This ensured synergies between the different fields of education and training (HE and VET) and complemented expertise with the ultimate goal of upskilling educators, so they can better help learners to acquire e-leadership skills. The primary target group was educators from both HE and tertiary VET institutions teaching those technology and business related disciplines particularly included in e-leadership programmes (i.e. Strategic Management, Project Management, Digital Transformation, Technology & Innovation, etc.). The secondary target groups, which benefited indirectly were: HEIs and tertiary VET providers of e-leadership programmes, learners (both students and professional trainees) willing to acquire e-leadership skills, associations of educational institutions, businesses, their HR managers and in-company trainers and professional associations. The eLead Speed project provided a set of highly usable and directly applicable outputs. A set of 15 short e-leadership courses, modules or course outlines and other practical and reusable resources (IO5) were developed by the educators based on the e-Leadership Observatory data (IO1) and the e-Leadership Competences Framework (IO2) and facilitated by the Community of Practice (IO3) and the Trainers’ Toolkit: How to Design, Deliver and Evaluate e-Leadership Curricula (IO4). The trainers worked collaboratively online to design the teaching materials making use of OER and e-tivities. The courses are stored and rendered available inside the OER repository (IO3) for free use by all trainers who are registered to the Community. The implemented methodology covered the entire cycle from industry requirements through occupational profiles to innovative educational content that provides relevant skills and competences and this way creates new opportunities for the industry but also creates new industry requirements for new training and courses. It followed the principles of incremental development and continuous improvement. The selected transdisciplinary, holistic approach guaranteed transferability and scalability of the results and secured high levels of sustainability. The areas of impact of eLead Speed can be summed up as: • Increased knowledge on e-leadership skill needs and occupational profiles • Increased availability of OER and content for e-leadership teaching • Increased capacity of educators to develop training programmes in consistency with market needs and occupational standards • Increased skills of educators to use and develop open learning materials and digital tools • Increased access to e-leadership education and training • Improved quality and relevance of education.

The cloud based services are growing rapidly in the European economy. Technology changes fast and there will be soon 5G technology available. These facts make this project highly relevant. Nowadays clouds are environments to offer different types of services, for example machine-learning tools and Software as a Service (SaaS). The cloud environments are extremely flexible and different amounts of CPU power can be allocated from small to massive amounts of data analysis. Data can be retrieved to cloud environments from different sources, from data storages and from sensors in the IoT applications. There are numerous digital service innovation topics in different fields of industry that can be developed. The goal of this project is to develop a European-wide, transnational, interconnected development service model and network based on cloud and mobile technologies (4G/5G). The latest tools of cloud and mobile technologies can be used for hands-on learning sessions, innovative co-operation and for innovative development of pilot projects for vocational excellence and companies. There will be created five digital innovation hubs for cloud based services in different locations in Europe. These hubs will be learning and development environments to VET students as well as development service environment for companies to renew their future views, the knowhow, skills and the digital service creation. The core proof of concept is developed for the Training program within the hub. The created hubs are interconnected and the best practices are transferred to the other hubs and development environments especially organized by VET -providers. The planned technologies are very new but also well tested and extremely flexible to be used in different applications in various sectors. More high-ability people are needed to take benefits from the latest cloud and mobile technologies in various businesses, which makes education of these topics for vocational excellence necessary.

“Kids in Clouds” is an interdisciplinary project that aims to introduce children with cloud-based services as early as the first grade of the primary school. Its main objective is to deliver well-rounded, useful and transferable educational programme in cloud-computing through development of educational modules for teachers and pupils, adaptation of contents and methods according to envisaged needs of the target groups, creation of didactic tools and production and recommendations on innovative education approaches. This is a project designed to meet challenges of the modern education system and challenging market needs, by providing an awareness-raising, holistic and flexible education in cloud-computing.The cloud based services are growing rapidly in the global and European economy. With the rise of 5G technology not only storage but also all data processing and applicative services will move in the cloud environment. This change is anticipated to come in the next 10 years. The move towards cloud-based environment will tremendously impact our work environments, as well as in general the way we use ICT solutions on a daily basis.We have established that switching from working in on-premise to cloud-based environment creates significant obstacles for users, as it requires them to relate to high-tech solutions in a different way. The aim of this project is to introduce cloud-based environment to children at the beginning of their primary school learning path. At that point, children do not differentiate on-premise from cloud-based content and services – for them, these are simply the tools to get things done. Sooner they encounter cloud-based services, easier it is for them to learn how to interact with them. Partners will carry out a wide range of activities in order to implement a high-quality, well-rounded project with the objective to develop educational content in cloud-computing for schools, to be implemented and used by partner organisations and other EU schools. More concretely, this project aims to develop online repository of materials for cloud-computing for non-ICT teachers to be used in non-ICT classes. It will thus contribute to popularization of cloud-computing outside of the ICT field, something that is strongly needed if we are to achieve a stronger use of cloud-computing. Its benefits must be understood but wider sections of society, not only by ICT experts. Why are so many businesses moving to the cloud? It is cost-efficient, secure, fast. Clouds enable us to work from anywhere. If we have learned anything during the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is that sectors of society which are better connected to internet can live through the lockdown much more successfully. Countries, where educational systems had a stronger and more robust cloud-infrastructure and cloud-services, they were able to keep the school year going in a much better way. Moving to cloud is also environmentally friendly. When you use the cloud, you only use the energy you need: if you use only one small application, you do not waste energy for powering an entire computer; therefore, you do not leave oversized carbon footprints.The project results are the direct answer to the envisaged target grups’ needs, and they comprise a complete set of resources for popularization and teaching of cloud-computing in schools across EU. Specifically, they are:- Gap analysis: report on to what extent are cloud-based services in use in schools at the moment. Built on that report, we will project further possibilities and mark the trajectory route on how grow on the existing situation.- Online repository of educational materials for teachers. This material will include general knowledge on what cloud-computing is, why and how we use and need it from the perspective of primary education, but more importantly, it will include didactic tools on how to teach children on this subject.- Online repository of educational materials for children. This will be a series of small-scale school projects for different school age groups, which can be used in different classes (language and literature, music, arts, mathematics, science, etc.). It is imperative that this materials is highly usable to a wide section of teachers and children. We will demonstrate through this material, how teachers can achieve the required learning outcomes in their programmes by using cloud-computing. - Piloting of the newly developed educational materials for teachers and for children. We will develop materials in one and pilot it in another country, so as to ensure that everything we produce is transnationally applicable and can satisfy the needs of very different national education systems.- Guidelines and recommendations on how to implement cloud-based computing content as a horizontal element in curricula, including tailoring recommendations so as to fit the demands of the three different national education systems that are partnering in this project.

Roads4All orchestrates a transformative shift in traffic safety culture across Europe through a holistic, multi-level approach targeting individual, organisational, and institutional levels. Conceptualising Living Roads, we co-design, implement and evaluate a comprehensive and tailored set of real-world, theory-informed, context-specific, and culture-sensitive road safety interventions in 5 diverse settings. Our approach centres on continuous engagement with all key stakeholders, ranging from school communities and road users to enterprises and authorities, establishing continuous consultation, collaboration, and feedback. Drawing on evidence-based tools we develop, such as the Roads4All model, framework and decision support toolkit, our interventions leverage both theoretical and empirical insights. We drive change to influence attitudes and promote safe behaviours by innovating with open schooling and Cultural & Creative Arts and experimenting with advanced technologies. We educate, increase awareness building readiness for change, cultivate empathy and co-existence on road, and recommend safe organisational practices. Ultimately, we create guidelines, a roadmap for change and suggest policies towards institutionalisation of traffic safety culture. By integrating strategy and practice, we seek to develop essential values and norms that support a robust traffic safety culture. With a special emphasis on youth, we aim to address high-risk groups and promote long-term behavioural change. Our diverse consortium, consisting of 14 partners from 8 countries, and our consultation structures at national, EU and international levels, bring together a wide range of expertise across EU and beyond, ensuring the replication and sustainability of Roads4All results in various cultural and contextual settings, and paving the way for a traffic cultural transformation that is aligned with targets for climate, health, and more.