Project “Catch it! Non-formal academy of activities” aims at young people between 18-30 years old from Denmark, Poland and Portugal. With this project we try to find a solution regarding youth unemployment, which according to the statistics from July 2014 in 28 European Union countries affects 5 million young people under 25 years old. 7,5 million of young people are considered as NEETs (not employed, not in education and not in training). According to the European Commission and Eurostat at the end of 2013 youth unemployment among young people up to 25 years old, amounts to 27,4% in Poland, 12,9% in Denmark and 36,3% in Portugal. The reasons of such a high unemployment are complex and are largely related directly to the circumstances of the education system and cultural environment in which young people grow up in. It is said that a good education is the key of your professional career. In reality highly qualified young people are struggling to find a permanent employment. The education system is not flexible and it does not reflect to the needs of the labour market. The world economic crisis additionally deepened this problem.The project aims at enhancing the quality and relevance of the non-formal learning offer in youth work of 3 project partnership organizations by developing new and innovative approaches and supporting the dissemination of best practices.Additional aims: enhancing key competences of 30 young people from Denmark, Portugal and Poland regarding entrepreneurship, languages and digital skills, creativity, group work skills, time management skills, by participation in testing and implementation of the method of non-formal academy of activities; professional development of 9 youth workers; simplification of access to open educational resources (OER) in the youth field for 150 participants from dissemination of intellectual outputs events.In the frames of the project we will implement: study visits in Denmark, Portugal and Poland, to support the dissemination of best practices; establishing the panel of experts, which will develop the method of non-formal academy of activities; training course regarding the developed method of non-formal academy of activities; events regarding to dissemination of intellectual outputs. During the project meetings, discussions, work group meetings, conferences, training courses, internships will be held, we will be using case-studies and scenarios.The intellectual outputs is a method of non-formal academy of activities, developed by experts and youth workers, which will be described in an open educational resource (OER).The impact of the project should be considered at the local, regional, national and European or even international level.Thanks to the implementation of the project it will be possible to develop organization skills regarding international cooperation, group work skills and also develop a method of non-formal education (ICT methodologies, learner-centred pedagogical approaches), using ICT to youth work and non-formal learning. The project involves also scenarios and case-studies, regarding testing of a method, preparing texts for the open educational resource and developing appropriate assessment and certification methods based on learning outcomes.In the long term perspective the project and the developed method of non-formal academy of activities will contribute to improving the quality and relevance of the learning offer in youth work.

We live and work in a VUCA environment:Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (Bennis, Nanus,1987), where the strive for innovation because of constant changes and competition have become the standard. Many organizations strive for innovation as a mean to cope in the VUCA elements. Consequently, they seek for employees who are creative, resilient and innovative problem solvers. They have to show professional abilities and skills in coping with rapid change, high-risk choice making and high-speed reaction. All this requires toleration to uncertainty, high motivation and innovativeness. However, there seem to be no available standard ways of dealing with volatile contexts and complex professional problems. Thus, professionals, increasingly, are confronted with their own uncertainty. The world is rapidly changing with and without Covid-19, with most areas of society facing a turning point.The ability to handle uncertainty in a productive manner is crucial for the present-day professionals, the organization they work in, the educators that educate them and for the society, they contribute to. A society that needs change makers. Although higher education represent a critical factor for making the necessary changes, previous studies show that HEIs lacks the knowledge, skills and tools to support their learners to develop their abilities to handle uncertainty in a positive, generative and productive manner. Similarly, an internal need analysis among the project partners, performed with the framework of the Ashoka questions (www.ashoka.org), showed that struggling with uncertainty is still undervalued, despite the fact that HEIs increasingly focus on training students to reflect on themselves as professionals. Without embedding uncertainty in the learning processes, as a part of professional and personal development, coping in the VUCA environment can lead to stress, anxiety and vulnerability, and thus hamper a growth mindset (Dweck, 2016) of students and employability of graduates. Therefore, the aim of this project is to fill the competence gap of handling uncertainty productively and professionalize educators to enable learners to develop their PUNC in their professional performance to find a way through this increasingly uncertain, changeable and ambiguous world. In this Strategic Partnership, 6 partners, from different corners of Europe, will combine their expertise, exchange knowledge and learn from one another’s cultures in a structural international exchange among educators and researchers on the themes of learning, competence, character skills development, innovative competences (FINCODA.eu) and pedagogies. Supporting educators to train resilient professionals who can engage their professional uncertainty in a positive and productive manner will be reached in four steps. First, the project outlines what the VUCA environment means in educational context and maps the best practices for designing these kind of learning environments. Second, the project creates a framework and model providing a validated description of the PUNC competence and related learning outcomes. In order to support the development of PUNC competence applied in the VUCA environments among educators and students, as a third step, the project creates and tests design principles and concrete tools for that. Finally, the project creates a process portfolio to document and authenticate the development of PUNC competence through HE studies.These steps will be implemented using participatory design thinking methodology with a minimum of 200 educators (HEIs, companies) and 240 learners from partner countries. The project seeks to involve other relevant stakeholders (e.g. educational community, companies, policymakers) in consulting and publicly supporting the PUNC products in the educational field. The theoretical and empirical framework in the project is a four-dimensional education theory (Fadel et al, 2015), presenting an action-oriented, structural framework designed to prepare students to cope with the present-day challenges. Project outcomes: teacher guidebook for designing VUCA learning environment with the best practices, PUNC competence framework, PUNC toolbox and the process-portfolio are modelled into easy to use approaches, intended for use throughout Europe. The results of the project not only benefit the project partners but also the other HEIs, educational companies, and policymakers. In a short term, project increases academic knowledge and shares practice-based experience among educators to handle uncertainty of professional performance and offers simple, practical and electronic tools for educators and learners to develop, apply and document their PUNC. In a long term, the project benefits graduates a toleration to uncertainty and keep their motivation and innovativeness high with better professional and entrepreneurial abilities and skills in coping with rapid change, high-risk choice making and high-speed reaction.

Partners: Austria: University of Applied Sciences bfi, Vienna, Croatia: University of Zagreb FOI & Varazdin Technology Park, Denmark: Business Academy Aarhus, Netherlands: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (project coordinator), Poland: Kozminski University, Warsaw.The five Higher Education Institutions in this project are both universities of applied science as well as academic universities. The universities have part-time (in-work) student populations. These students, and many of their full-time students as well, have no or limited opportunities to travel for their study programme or be part of an international classroom, especially from Poland and Croatia. However, they still need to develop skills like intercultural communication, digital competences, teamwork and research skills in an international setting to enhance their employability in today’s globalised working environment. Professionals who have a proven ability to work effectively in international, virtual, multi-disciplinary teams are increasingly in high demand. The solution we offer is the Market Basket Virtual Student Collaboration model which we have developed based upon virtual student teams from different countries. Students from the same or different disciplines and courses working together on a specific project assignment. This could be an assignment issued by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) or a case study or another practical assignment. The students do not meet in person, but use Skype, email, social media or online platforms to work together. In this way they acquire the virtual (and intercultural) collaboration skills which they will need for their future workplace. Afterwards, students evaluate, analyse and benchmark cross-border working methods and techniques, cross-cultural competencies and present their research findings to the clients in a report. The need for information about cross-cultural topics and market information among SMEs induced us to include SMEs as important stakeholders. SMEs or start-up companies from the partner's business networks and our sixth partner in the consortium, Technology Park Varazdin, provided real-life assignments for the student teams to work on. This added the entrepreneurial element to the students' assignments and taught students to interact with clients. Since we also aim to inspire other HEIs to use our virtual teamwork model, we decided to make the model less marketing oriented and more multi-disciplinary. The new name and visual identity became “Beezr”. A full implementation pack with handbooks and a full set of teaching materials is offered via our website www.beezr.eu . No login needed and available for use within Europe or outside Europe.The methodology which was used in carrying out this two year strategic partnership project was as follows:During the first year the implementation pack with training materials and necessary resources and a website as an Open Educational Resource and with a login protected work and sharing space (only available upon registration) was created. Throughout the two project years the testing, evaluation and adjusting of the implementation pack and website was carried out through concrete teaching pilots from various Bachelor programmes of the participating HEIs, e.g. Marketing, Project Management, IT, Multi-media , Communication Management and other programmes. This included 450 students, about 30 lecturers and 12 companies. The final results of the project were disseminated during a launch conference called Virtual Collaboration Across Cultures for 75 lecturers and managers from HEIs from the Netherlands, from Europe and beyond, on 28 and 29 November 2016. Key note speaker Liat Shentser, manager at Cisco Systems, confirmed that virtual teamwork is not the future, but that it is already very much the present. ‘Graduate students need to be taught the skills how to function in such teams consisting of colleagues in many different countries and from many different cultures’.The impact and long term benefits of the Beezr (MAB 2.0) projects are manifold Firstly, a set of support materials is available as open resource on www.beezr.eu . Secondly, lecturers and managers of our own institutions have incorporated virtual teamwork in their lessons. Lastly, awareness has grown within our partner institutes and beyond about the importance of introducing virtual teamwork into the educational programmes because employers need students to have intercultural, virtual teamwork skills and graduates who are savvy at both the ICT as well as the interpersonal side of this collaboration. Moreover, the model shows examples of how to foster cooperation and bridge the worlds of education and work by working with real assignments of SMEs via the business network.This is why we intend to continue the website for the next two years to promote free access for the public to the intellectual outputs of the project adding to the sustainability of the project

Indonesia, the main target area of this project, is a rapidly growing economy with an annual growth rate of around 6% in the last years. The Government of Indonesia sees the development of the country in the processing of natural resources and has called in international companies to help to industrialize the country. Industrialization can show success within a few years only with special commitment from the education sector.Based on the needs analysis made in Indonesia by INDOPED project partners, a number of challenges related to higher education have been identified. In most universities teaching still seems to be based on a teacher-centered approach. Students don’t get enough contacts with companies during their studies. Therefore there is a great need to modernize Indonesian pedagogical practices to meet the requirements of working life.The overall aim of the INDOPED project is to raise the teaching capacity of Indonesian University teachers that they will be enabled to bring the Higher Education to the European standard. Teachers should be able to compete in the league of World Class Universities, as Indonesian University rectors have written in their objective agreements with the Indonesian Ministry of HE. The quality of teaching is considered the major factor towards modern and competitive higher education. We see that teachers role should be more like a mentor and facilitator of learning, not a teacher in the traditional meaning. We strongly believe that active University-enterprise cooperation, which gives students more possibilities to enhance their competencies in real working life situations, is a key for more efficient as well as cost-effective higher education. During the INDOPED project we shall test and adjust European active learning practices and embed the most valuable ones into the structures of Indonesian partner universities. Effective dissemination will make the results available for Universities ASEAN wide.