Teaching excellence if of primary importance for the learning environment in higher education. Thus, TEACHEX is a project conceived to contribute to the continuous professional development of academic staff by offering adequate support structures (Centers for Teaching Excellence)and innovative, high-quality, flexible programs designed to promote better teaching and therefore enhanced learning as well. Other specific goals of the project are:1. To improve quality of education by contributing to university management in accordance with academic staff needs, connecting personal and civic fulfilment with the ‘transferable skills required for a rapidly changing world. 2. To develop and deliver training materials and follow up activities for staff working at CTEs. 3. To create support structures in CTEs that outline conditions for project sustainability 4. To produce benchmark tools for teaching excellence that serve as medium and long term analysis. 5. To disseminate the European experience in teacher training and preparation of documents necessary for enhancing the interaction between the CTEs and other educational key stakeholders in IL.The main outputs and outcomes areTo place sustainable structures for academic professional development in function of academic staff an student needs, connecting personal and civic fulfilment with the ‘transferable skills required for a rapidly changing world To develop and deliver training materials for professional development including elearning and active education in IL To evaluate the impact of training and use of materials in relationships between continuing education, academic and student groups through the piloting of professional courses To create a digital repository with open educational resources of easy access to allTo disseminate outcomes broadly in IL (ie website, newsletters, media) and internationally To create informal networks through a social media app generating conditions for sustainability

The ‘Get Ready’ project aims to integrate service-learning methodology into Physical Therapy and Sport Sciences University degrees by offering students individual service opportunities (placements) with Residential Care Homes, in order to co-create the best suited physical activity (PA)/ sedentary behaviour (SB) intervention with researchers, older adults (end-users) in care homes, health professionals and policy makers. The project will use a Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology and will follow the objectives of workforce development to support users to demand more responsive and integrated care programmes for chronic diseases, and to involve end-users in their health management and decision-making relevant to their own health (Action Area 6). We will use mixed methods to assess the intervention feasibility and acceptability (including process evaluation) and we will conduct a pilot study of a two armed pragmatic randomized controlled trial to assess the effectiveness of a 12-week complex intervention on reducing SB and increasing PA, infused with behaviour change technologies, in an institutionalized older population. This complex intervention co-designed with care home residents and conducted by university students will be compared to existing PA interventions (usual care), conducted by health professionals working in the Residential Care Homes. The experienced researcher will significantly expand her scientific knowledge by combining it with the new themes of SB as a risk factor for health and its assessment in institutionalized older adults, shorten the gap between students and real life conditions, and the process of PAR methodology to co-create a robust intervention through workforce development with end-users, providing a logical progression and extension of her knowledge, enhancing the experienced researcher’s academic skills and offering a distinct progression on wider academic (as opposed to purely research) skills.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

The aim of the project is to develop software which can automatically classify the emotional content of any piece of music. The recent increase in popularity of large personal digital music collections and online music retailers has led to a need for new, interactive access methods. Current interfaces to large music databases only allow users to search for music by genre, artist, or similarity to other music items.There is very little research in the area of automatically extracting the emotional content of music. Existing methods have been tested only on classical music pieces, and these algorithms have tended to rely on a fairly limited set of musical features. There is a variety of music features such as mode (a given series of musical intervals), tonality (the relationship between pitches in the music), and pitch (perceived frequency) which are key to expressing emotion in the composition of music. The project aim is to develop software that uses these features to more accurately identify the emotional content of any piece of musicAllowing the user to browse for music by its emotional effect represents a step toward addressing the needs and preferences of the user in music information retrieval. This technology will allow the user to easily select a subset of their own personal music database to suit their current mood. Software like this is a good example of how technology can seamlessly merge into our daily activities.