The Improving Digital Empowerment for Active Healthy Living project (IDEAHL) aims at developing and testing new models and approaches of (digital) health literacy ((d)HL) intervention development and application through the co-creation of a comprehensive and inclusive EU (d)HL Strategy. The IDEAHL consortium is composed of 14 multi-disciplinary partners from 10 EU Member States, which work hand in hand with patients, citizens, and the broad socio-economic sector at local level. The project will first conduct an extensive mapping of health literacy (HL) and (d)HL research, initiatives, and projects in the EU and beyond. It will define best practices and champions in these fields to foster knowledge exchange and uptake of selected practices. Building on these foundations, IDEAHL will launch a large co-creation process to design and plan its EU (d)HL Strategy. The project will involve over 1,300 different stakeholders, from citizens and patients to healthcare and social services, policy makers, non-health sectors, academia, etc. The collected feedbacks will allow to develop an inclusive Strategy to improve (d)HL for the benefit of all citizens focusing on health promotion, disease prevention, treatment and (self-)care as well as on monitoring its impact on the wellbeing, productivity and the economy. The Strategy will pay special attention to social innovation, inclusion, gender, and ethics & privacy dimensions. Finally, a number of actions of the Strategy will be piloted in the 10 project countries. From the testing and evaluation of the pilots, IDEAHL will be able to put forward a common EU monitoring model and indicators for (d)HL levels. The ultimate purpose of the project will be to empower EU citizens in using digital tools to take a more active role in the management of their own health and well-being, as well as supporting social innovations for person-centred care models.

Increased introduction of digital technologies into manufacturing is leading to increased automation. Estimates indicate that the potential for automation in predictable physical work is at 33% followed by 22% in data collection and 11% in data processing. The increased globalisation in manufacturing also introduces requirements in terms of team work, intercultural and language capabilities, the need to deal with shorter production cycles, and changes in demographics requiring workers to stay active for longer. Europe faces considerable challenges in addressing future skills needs. From the perspective of the workforce the issues are increasingly complex where current training and educational solutions are discrete and lack interconnections and are largely dissociated from work activities. Growing gaps in knowledge and know-how make it increasingly challenging to adapt, work proactively and contribute to innovations. FIT4FoF aims at addressing a range of these issues by analysing current skills initiatives, better to understand how to address workers' needs, analysing technology trends across 6 industrial areas of robotics, additive manufacturing, mechatronics/machine automation, data analytics, cybersecurity and human machine interaction, to define new job profiles, which will inform education and training requirements. FIT4FoF will develop a new education and training framework, which places workers (women and men) at the centre of a co-design and development process that recognises and addresses their skills needs. By applying educational approaches based on Communities of Practice, FIT4FoF will empower workers to be drivers of the design, development and delivery of their own upskilling programmes. FIT4FoF will develop Alliances of Communities of Practice to broaden the approach across Europe, creating replication strategies enabling educational/training design and development practices to be transferred between regional communities across Europe.

<< Background >>The environment and fight against climate change are an urgent focus on national, EU and global scenes recognizing key role of higher education institutions (HEIs) contributing to the changes needed to become climate neutral by 2050. Developing competencies and future-oriented curricula that meet the needs of individuals and the respective industries are highly required as the construction industry holds great responsibility and potential for supporting this agenda. Developing green sectorial skills and future-oriented curricula are essential aspects of preparing students, lecturers, and practitioners to become actual change factors.The construction industry is responsible for 40% of energy use, one-third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and has one of the most significant waste streams generated within the EU. This underpins the urgency of addressing the environmental aspects, supported by the EU Green Deal strategy, Paris Agreement and the UN’s 2030 Agenda for SDGs.SUSTAINABUILD will support three HEIs in Denmark, Finland, and Belgium and a construction business association in Spain to develop activities to foster the acquisition of interdisciplinary green skills and awareness towards the environmental challenges of their students and lecturers based on solid input and needs from the construction industry, thus ensuring the triple helix approach throughout SUSTAINABUILD. Therefore, the overall aim of this project is to equip students at construction engineering programmes through increased sustainable knowledge, awareness, and interdisciplinary green sectorial skills in an international perspective using innovative digital didactic learning methods and digital mobility. Additionally, SUSTAINABUILD aims to provide valuable insights into the contribution of the built environment to practitioners and lecturers within the field and to ultimately push the sustainability agenda in Europe and accelerate the implementation by internationally exchanging ideas and good practices.<< Objectives >>The main objective of SUSTAINABUILD is to develop a 5 ECTS hybrid course (WP3) focusing in detail on how construction projects (new buildings and renovation projects) can support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda and implement the course in the educational programmes of the partners. The course will consist of a theoretical and a practical part. It will provide a platform for lecturers to digitally facilitate interdisciplinary and international learning activities, thereby strengthening the interdisciplinary capabilities and awareness of sustainable solutions among students within construction engineering programmes who can participate in group work transnationally on industrial cases using digital mobility.As a foundation for the course, a thorough analysis, with input from the national reference groups will be made (WP2), resulting in a strategy for enhancing SDG integration in construction projects, including details on what the curriculum should cover, along with practical cases of SDG implementation in construction projects. Based on the strategic design framework results, new educational material will be developed for the course and tested twice among 150 students at the HEIs, along with a digital handbook (WP4) aimed towards practitioners, lecturers, and students within the construction industry which will include cases from the industry and the education material. The handbook and the other educational material will be freely accessible and available through e.g. the Erasmus Project Result Platform to all parties interested, thus enhancing lifelong learning.<< Implementation >>WP2 focuses on the strategic design framework, developing a strategy for enhancing SDG integration in construction projects. This WP commence with establishing reference groups of industrial partners and conducting state-of-the-art analysis, based on mapping the explicit links between the SDGs and the built environment and input from the construction industry. These inputs form the foundation for developing the strategic design framework, consisting of (1) a strategy for enhancing SDG integration in construction projects, including an overview of the current state of implementation of the SDGs in the four partner countries along with the needs of the companies. (2) A list of sustainable construction dimensions related to the SDGs and targets that should be covered in the curriculum of the hybrid course (WP3), and (3) a collection of practical cases of SDG implementation to be included in the digital handbook (WP4) and in the educational material of WP3. WP3 focuses on the hybrid course that is designed, developed, tested, and evaluated. Initially, teaching material and online teaching didactic and methods are reviewed. Based on the learning goals, the overall training concept and a specification for a set of e-learning elements based on the learning outcomes will be developed. Educational material will be developed for the digital course and will be improved through a peer-to-peer review process among the lecturers involved in the project, transnationally. Two pilot tests will be run to test the hybrid course at the partner institutions. The students will use digital mobility to work in international and multi-disciplinary teams and planned accordingly to existing semester plans; 150 students are expected to participate. WP 4 focuses on the design and development of the digital handbook, which will provide practical guidelines for practitioners, lecturers, and students within the construction industry on how construction projects can contribute to achieving the SDGs. Initially, the framework for the handbook will be developed, including the digital platform and the structure of the handbook. Then, the actual content for the handbook will be developed, including practical cases for the target groups, and finally, the content will be collected and set up, forming the digital handbook.WP 5 supports a broad impact by regular communication and dissemination of the project results. The final conference (ME1) and local events (ME2, ME3, ME4) will bring together project partners, national reference group members and other interested parties.<< Results >>The expected key results of SUSTAINABUILD are:A STRATEGIC DESIGN FRAMEWORK (WP2) of how the SDGs can be integrated into construction projects, along with a list of SDG construction dimensions and targets that the hybrid course (WP3) needs to cover. The strategic design framework will provide insights into the current state of implementation of the SDGs in construction in the partner countries and current local needs in the industry. The strategic design framework will provide valuable insights and serve as foundation for both developing WP3 and WP4 as well as future education material that can be developed after the project ends, thereby ensuring sustainability. THE HYBRID COURSE AND COURSE MATERIAL (WP3) focusing on how construction projects can contribute to the 2030 Agenda will provide students of construction engineering educational programmes with interdisciplinary and international knowledge and skills. The hybrid course utilizes the results from WP2 and will consist of a theoretical and a practical module based on a reflective learning approach. Furthermore, the course will strengthen digital mobility through international and multi-disciplinary group work between the students. THE DIGITAL HANDBOOK (WP4) will provide practical guidelines on how the SDGs can be implemented in construction projects, focusing on the entire construction process, from early design and programming to renovation or demolition. The digital handbook will serve as an advisory tool and will be targeted at practitioners within the construction industry, such as advisors, professional buildings owners, contractors, etc. as well as students and lecturers at HEIs as the handbook will be included in the hybrid course curriculum as educational material. The handbook will be freely accessible to all interested parties. The project results created in SUSTAINABUILD underline that the challenges within the construction industry cannot be solved by one country alone. We must work together and create shared knowledge and solutions to reach our joint aim – to contribute to the UN’s 2030 Agenda and the SDGs by improving our HEIs through cooperation transnationally and interculturally by including the triple helix approach to develop new innovative educational material which ensures that our students – and thereby the future workforce – have the optimal competences and skills to implement a sustainable construction industry.

STEM teachers play a key role in attracting pupils to STEM subjects via engaging, real-world classroom practices, which naturally involve interdisciplinary problem solving, inquiry and/or design. However, STEM teachers are not trained to implement such practices. In order for secondary STEM education to better represent real-world practices, STEM teachers need to be schooled in an interdisciplinary way in parallel to their discipline-specific pedagogical schooling. Furthermore, as one of the primary providers of digitally competent workforce, STEM education should pave the way for the accelerated transformation towards a more digital world. Future STEM teachers as well as their teacher educators must be prepared to take on that challenge. This project aims to engage teacher educators and researchers in investigating and developing efficient means and materials to immerse student STEM teachers in interdisciplinary cooperation, problem solving, and content creation via 100% online learning opportunities.This online training must prepare future STEM teachers for coaching pupils in high-quality integrated STEM (iSTEM) education with a sufficient amount of cross-disciplinary competence and self-efficacy. Having student teachers cooperate in multidisciplinary teams to design and implement iSTEM learning units is a powerful strategy to achieve this objective. However, how this training strategy can be implemented effectively in purely online training is yet to be explored. Therefore, teacher educators and researchers will work together in this project to prepare and develop a rich online learning environment that supports the student teachers in their online, interdisciplinary, team-regulated (and team-paced) learning (including problem solving, design, and implementation of iSTEM learning units). We will first construct a report on key competences of effective (i)STEM teachers (IO1), based on our national teaching contexts and current gaps in teacher education programmes, European and scientific publications, and societal challenges. Guided by these key competences, we will develop online training and coaching materials (IO2), and an online platform (IO4), including scaffolding questions, guidelines, tools, applications, e-assessment, and features supporting the student teachers in their online cooperative, interdisciplinary learning. The training materials and features of this whole online learning environment will be tailored to (1) the targeted key competences, (2) suggestions from research literature on the desired training strategy, (3) the scaffolding needs of the student teachers detected during the first project year. The online platform and training materials will be developed and refined via iteration during two successive academic years. We will develop and implement an instrument (IO3) to assess student teachers’ learning gains from this online training with respect to the targeted key competences. The digital iSTEM learning units designed by the student teachers as part of the online training (IO5) will be made openly available for pre- and in-service STEM teachers to use with their pupils.This project will be realised through cross-fertilization and collaboration of five partners in the field of higher education:- For exploring, developing, and field testing evidence-based digital training materials that will scaffold the online learning environment:> the academic STEM teacher education department of KU Leuven, with 9 campuses across Belgium, brings its expertise in effective iSTEM pedagogies and curriculum design, and in research-based pre-service upper secondary STEM teacher training;> the STEM teacher education department of University College of Northern Denmark brings its expertise in competence-, inquiry- and ICT-based pre-service lower secondary STEM teacher training; and> the Ágoston Trefort Centre for Engineering Education of Óbuda University in Hungary brings its expertise in development of e-learning materials, in coaching and mentorship in upper secondary technical/vocational STEM teacher training.- For developing the online platform that will provide the frame of the online learning environment:> the Software Engineering and Internet Technologies Laboratory of the computer science department of the University of Cyprus brings its expertise in design and programming of state-of-the-art educational technologies and digital materials.- For disseminating the project results:> SEFI brings its expertise in networking, and communication and its large network in the field of engineering education.This partnership hopes to propagate its enthusiasm towards the professional field and the research community, and to create awareness of the crucial role of interdisciplinary STEM teacher training. In the long term, we hope to see the effect of the online training reflected in an increased number of STEM-literate, motivated pupils taking up higher STEM study programmes or STEM careers.

The above is already written in English.