The MS FSCC project brings five leading Southeast Asian higher education institutions in agriculture and life sciences from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to build a joint master’s degree on the topic of Food Security and Climate Change. These HEIs have been working together within the Southeast Asian University Consortium for Graduate Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC) since 1989 and have a concrete experience of exchanges in Science and Academic programmes but never reached the level of building a joint degree. The MS FSCC was designed on the model of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degrees in Europe. It aimed at responding to acute needs in the professional sector that developed recently, where each individual university may not have all the disciplinary resources to address such topics at the highest (postgraduate) level. This difficulty is generally increased when the professional targets of the learning objectives lead to multidisciplinary orientations of teaching and research. A consortium of universities sharing common learning objectives and organising the mobility of students according to their individual academic strengths was assumed to be in a better position than individual Universities to produce graduates relevant to the market needs. This is the case with Food Security and Climate Change to prepare graduates to work at implementing the commitments of the member countries at the last Paris Conference on Climate Change, while taking into consideration the challenges of food security linked with the recent implementation of the ASEAN integrated market. This corresponds to a new professional challenge in the area of agriculture in SE Asia. The UC has the necessary skills to address this challenge, but individually, none have all the skills needed to properly address the training needs in this domain. Building a joint degree and using mobility to get the best offer in the region may better address that new challenge rather than what they would do individually. Simultaneously with the development of the synopsis of joint MS FSCC programme was the challenge of offering a dual/double degree, an innovation that the UC had never done before. By building common rules to govern within the MS FSCC: exchange/mobility of students, mutual recognition of courses between pairs of Universities within the UC, organisation of summer schools to offer courses to accommodate all students, option to have one semester mobility in Europe to complement the local supply of courses, FSCC-wide quality assurance system recognised by each of the collaborating Universities, and joint evaluation of master thesis between academic teams, Departments, Faculties of the different co-graduating Universities, the UC has experimented agreements that lead to building other post graduate joint programmes, a major institutional innovation in the SE Asian academic world. Whereas building this joint degree was much inspired by the European experience of the Erasmus Mundus programme, it required several adaptations and innovative rules in the participating Universities’ academic systems. These adaptations took more time than initially expected as it had to be accepted in five Universities in parallel and in real practice, for real students, in a real joint programme, and not just in theory. These innovations have been clearly identified, and at least they have been addressed in the case of a first collaborative programme, run with three successive cohorts of students.

The adoption of Industry 4.0 by developed countries poses a significant threat to other countries and nations. It is expected that each country will face a number of challenges related to the skill level of its employees. Industry 4.0 will provide expertise in information technology, data analytics… in the industrial sectors. The result is a growing need for skilled employees trained in cross-cutting areas and capable of managing new processes and information systems. The aim of this project is to build Skills 4.0 THrough UniversitY and Entreprise Collaboration (SHYFTE) by analysing the gap between the skills acquired in HEIs and the skills required by industry 4.0, and develop a new model of emergent skills in line with the needs of the industry of the future. To provide a performant job market platform in Thailand, China and Malaysia. SHYFTE project will provide an emergent skill development strategy in both EU and Asia with main focus on four research domains: Industrial engineering and management, Software Engineering and Big data analytics, Wireless and Networks analytics, and Artificial Intelligence by incorporating the competencies of all partners to fill the skill gap in Asian partner countries. The overall aims of SHYFTE project are:- To support academic and administrative staff in Asian HEIs to design and implement new methodology and learning materials to enhance and improve the competences and skills related to Industry 4.0. That will enable HEIs organizations aligning their learning program strategy both to the requirements of the regional industry and the global labor market. - To build and strengthen links between HEIs and Industry 4.0, and promote the job market by minimizing the skills gap.- To build Skills 4.0 LABs or Learning centers of excellence in Asian Partner's HEIs to enable each of them to become the reference center in its country and disseminate the outcomes of the project nationally and regionally.

The aim of the project ‘MultiMind’ is to establish an international, multidisciplinary and multisectorial training network on multilingualism. Given the current migration and refugee crisis in Europe, there is an urgent need to provide an in depth investigation of multilingualism from a multidisciplinary perspective that will bridge the gap between fundamental and applied research and will addresses societal challenges within the education and health sector as well as challenges related to the education of migrants and refugees in Europe. MultiMind addresses the benefits and challenges of multilingualism through an innovative research programme that combines fundamental and applied research across disciplines in a range of different social and educational settings. It investigates the influence of multilingualism on language learning, cognition, creativity, and decision making, on brain function and structure, and its role as a reserve in atypical populations using a combination of cutting edge research methodologies. MultiMind is composed of 9 academic and 2 non-academic organisations as well as 16 partners in leading academic institutions, companies, health organisations and 5 branches of Bilingualism Matters, a leading international network of centres that provide outreach activities on multilingualism. The consortium brings together researchers with complementary expertise within the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, education, neuroscience, and speech & language therapy along with non-academic partners within the education and health sectors, IT and publishing. This will enable to address societal challenges within education and health as well as challenges related to the migration and refugee crisis in Europe whilst training a new generation of researchers in world-leading labs using cutting edge methodologies and allowing them to build the necessary skills fostering their career progress as independent researchers in academic or nonacademic sectors.

Despite e-learning being a national higher education agenda, a survey on Malaysian HEIs found that implementation of digital learning tools remains suboptimal. There is a need to develop high quality e-learning content and build capacity in academic and technical staff around digital pedagogies and development of digital resources. This project will involve three EU Programme Countries with an international reputation for digital learning (UK, Norway, Sweden) working with three Malaysian HEIs to produce locally relevant materials to ‘train the trainers’ on how to develop high quality interactive multimedia learning tools called reusable learning objects (RLOs) in the fields of medicine, nursing, biomedical science and other health-related disciplines. The training is structured around the ASPIRE methodology (Aim, Storyboard, Populate, Implement, Release, Evaluate) for the development of RLOs. ASPIRE involves a participatory co-creation process involving end users and other stakeholders in workshops to ensure alignment of the digital content with the individual learning needs of the students. 22 RLOs will be developed during the project and housed in an open access repository which will be sustained after the project to accommodate further RLOs from the growing teams of developers. The RLOs will be integrated into the curricula of the partner institutions and evaluated. By providing the RLOs as trackable open educational resources, the outputs of the project will achieve reach and impact beyond just the institutions involved. The consortium will reach out to the Malaysian HEI e-learning stakeholders through support from the Ministry of Higher Education as well as individual HEI learning and teaching centres.

RECONECT aims to contribute to European reference framework on Nature Based Solutions (NBS) by demonstrating, referencing and upscaling large scale NBS and by stimulating a new culture for 'land use planning' that links the reduction of risks with local and regional development objectives in a sustainable way. To do that, RECONECT draws upon the network of carefully selected Demonstrators and Collaborators that cover a range of local conditions, geographic characteristics, governance structures and social/cultural settings to successfully upscale NBS throughout Europe and Internationally. The RECONECT consortium is a transdisciplinary partnership between researchers, industry partners (SMEs and large consultancies) and responsible agencies at the local and watershed/regional level dedicated to achieve the desired outcomes of the project.