MYSUN is a NATIONAL STRUCTURAL ACTION in Malaysia which aims to promote university campuses as “living laboratories” for sustainability and energy efficiency by strengthening the partners’ capacities and creating a national-level framework that will support other Malaysian HEIs in developing a sustainable culture on their campuses. Fully in line with the Erasmus+ priorities of improving management and operations of HEIs, and backed by the Malaysian Ministry of Education, this framework (including a national network & policy recommendations) will support the entire Malaysian HE system in achieving its sustainability objectives. The initiative fits in both with the Malaysian government's on-going efforts in sustainable development, and the needs identified in the 8 PC HEIs for external support for increasing their capacities and the foster collaboration at a national level. Specifically MYSUN aims to• Build the human capacities in university campuses’ sustainability & energy efficiency in Malaysia;• Develop a platform to promote and support a culture of sustainable HEI campuses in the Malaysian HE system through the establishment of the MYSUN Network and the delivery of a pilot MOOC on sustainability in HEI campusesIt will achieve this through a series of actions centred on1) Analysis & Training (analysis of Malaysian HEI campus sustainability practices to identify training & institutional needs; training delivered through ToT workshops, seminars and a pilot MOOC)2) Institutional Strengthening (through Sustainability Offices, Sust. Campaigns & Sust. Plans)3) Strategic Development at National Level (through local roundtables, + national workshops & conferences org. by national MYSUN Network)4) Ensuring high-quality, visible and on-time + on-budget results

Advanse aims at promoting the modernization of financial management practices and income diversification strategies in HE institutions at regional level, with a view to sustainably strengthen the Higher Education systems and maximize the social return on investment in Higher Education in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. More specific it aims at:-enhancing human, organisational and technical capacities of partner countries HEIs to increase efficiency in financial management (FM) and income diversification, promoting accountability and transparency through systematisation and promotion of good practice.-promoting regional integration through creating a network of financial managers pursuing modernisation of financial management systems and practices.The prjoect will have a sustainable impact on following levels:1. Increased awareness on regional level HEIs & policy makers on common challenges and existing initiatives in modernising FM and income diversification strategies in HE, through systematisation of experiences and supra-regional promotion of good practice; 2. Enhanced human, organisational & technical capacities at institutional levels to improve efficient FM and create a pool of qualified human resources capable to effectively implement reforms, using modern tools and methodologies; 3. Sustainably strengthened institutional modernisation capacities, through development of strategic action plans and joint strategies for efficient FM and income diversification; 4. Region-wide impact and replication of project outputs through creation and implementation of a supra-regional network; 5. Active involvement of relevant actors & non-partner HEIs and region-wide up-take through consistent dissemination strategy

<< Background >>Background and motivation: Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the higher educational institutions’ educators and students are meeting in hybrid modalities, where an educator is in a classroom with some students and the rest are attending from home. In some cases, all attend from home. The software video conferencing systems alone are not sufficient to communicate the teachers’ writing on a board, presentation slides, the gesture and posture, and engage students in groups or individually with differentiated or engaging activities. Additional online applications and accessories are used along with video conferencing systems for sending the information interfaces a student gets in a face-to-face classroom. For the educators, managing multiple devices and acting in front of the camera to provide a good experience for the viewers is different from face-to-face interaction. The suitable solutions are highly context-dependent but the use-case scenarios in terms of purpose and pedagogical design are similar. The activities involving lectures, student presentations, group-formation and group work, live quizzes, peer-group assessment, and collaborative design and facilitation are some of the activities that require integration of video-conferencing functionalities and various web-based software. The digital capabilities in the online teaching context involve even the use of camera setup, light settings, body language, eye contact, and other digital and non-digital tools - depending on the field of study. The new roles and competencies required from teachers and students for engaging in video-conferencing systems that bring the learning experience closest to face-to-face classroom require strategic “diffusion of innovations”. The diversity of available digital systems (hardware accessories and software) and the pedagogical designs with technology setup for engaging classes are context-sensitive. Research shows that the students engage and participate less in the online sessions, feel or get excluded by turning off video and microphone for avoiding technical issues or due to the absence of social norms, and require higher levels of motivation to be active in the courses. The problems are endorsed by educators, students, e-learning consultants/trainers at higher educational institutions, and institutional and national policy-makers. Understanding the diverse classroom environment (i.e. lecture gallery, design studio, science lab, court-like law classes, etc.) and what it takes to make a portable video-conferencing toolkit, a list of online application to engage students, and a set of social norms as good practices - are necessary to uphold the quality of teaching.The definition of portable video conferencing in this study includes but not limited to ‘mobile video conferencing’ (Neustaedter et al., 2020), additional hardware including wireless speakers and microphones, separate webcam, pen tablets to substitute whiteboard, or streaming separate camera views for the teacher and whiteboard/blackboard, etc.<< Objectives >>The main objectives are as follows. First, to improve synchronous online and blended teaching, demanded in the context of COVID19 pandemic by (a) conducting a systematic literature review on the technological and pedagogical factors associated with user experiences in synchronous online classes, (b) by collecting best practice scenarios of educational video conferencing around the globe and identifying challenges, following the Design Thinking methodology, and (c) designing two toolkits for educational video conferencing based on ideating and testing multiple prototypes in various contexts.Second, to facilitate capacity building among educators to become professional online and blended tutors or teachers’ trainers (a) by designing and evaluating teacher training materials on video conferencing, (b) by presenting the technological and pedagogical best practices in the form of educational materials and a competence matrix for engaging students using online applications, (c) by organizing two educator training workshops and summarizing them in the form of a reproducible model.'Third, to improve the quality and efficiency of education across the globe by (a) producing comprehensive materials on educational video conferencing as open educational resources, (b) developing competence matrices for educators and students, (c) based on the competence matrices, developing self-assessment tools for teachers and students for self-reflection and evaluation of training workshops, (d) involving a variety of stakeholders in Europe and Asia, and (e) disseminating project results globally.Fulfilling the objectives will lead to a set of complementing resources on educational video conferencing validated in practice in multiple contexts. These resources include two portable video conferencing toolkits with associated pedagogical best practices, open-access educational materials on the topic of video conferencing and use of the toolkits, and competence matrices for educators and students for self-assessment of relevant skills.The ultimate goal of the project is to enable an educational experience using a portable video-conferencing setup and pedagogically designed activities that are as close as possible to the experience of the face-to-face classroom. The global educational system will ultimately have the required technological setup and the digital, behavioural, and social competencies for engaging online classroom interaction.<< Implementation >>The design of the project is guided by European policies, strategies, and tools. The open and accessible online educational materials follow the EU ``Opening Up Education”, the “Digital Learning & ICT in Education” 2018, and “Digital Education Action Plan” 2018. The state-of-the-art report, best practices report, educational resources, competence matrix, and personal development questionnaires as tools will be available as open access resources for all interested in the border domain of digital learning technologies.The production of the project results is the central activity of the project. In the tasks of this activity, we apply ‘design thinking’ as a digital transformation process for improving the online synchronous teaching-learning experience by developing two portable video-conferencing toolkits and other online applications in a good pedagogical design.We involve educators, students, e-learning professionals along with IT support, and higher education policy-makers from a human-centred design perspective of service design and innovation. The digital design, from the perspective of interaction design, has three perspectives for developing innovative practices in the digital era: (i) technology-centred view, (ii) a behaviourist view, (iii) the social interaction view. We involve partners from the different schools of thoughts and perspectives for defining both the problem domain and the solution space. From a human-centred design perspective, the participatory approach in the digital transformation will improve the digital readiness and capacity among the designers, management roles involved in defining the policies and procedures, and the users of the systems.Other activities of the project include external communication and outreach activities across Europe and Asia throughout the lifetime of the project, including six multiplier events. The project will also engage in training activities by organizing two training events, one in Europe and one in Asia, creating a global impact. The project includes activities dedicated to the wide dissemination of the project results, including the publication of the results in open access, supplying guides and documentation, and using different sharing platforms.<< Results >>The project results and other related outcomes of the EdViCon project are:- an international partnership on video conferencing and setting up a standard of excellence,- innovation in higher education in using portable video conferencing and other online tools for engaging students,- acknowledging and defining the complexities and diversities of teaching styles and learning preferences that involve technological, social, behavioural, and other temporal factors responsible for video-conferencing mediated teaching and learning- development of competency matrices for educators and students, which will be used for devising personal development questionnaires for self-reflection and the evaluation of competence development training workshops for various target groups (educators, students, e-learning professional, management, and national policymakers)- a reproducible workshop model will be developed through the participation of target groups and tested in European, Asian, and Arab higher educational contexts will result in a robust model and potentially adapted according to the contexts of use and culture. -The state-of-the-art review, use case scenarios, the ten technological-pedagogical courses and other resources will be part of training the educators, accessible through a free video e-learning platform and various dissemination channels including the website. These resources shall have created a sufficient digital footprint for awareness creation and institutional quality assurance initiatives through the adoption of the resources/results. For educators in HE, different types of classrooms (i.e. design studio, gallery, laboratory, etc.) and subject culture or signature pedagogy (for example, chalk and talk/software-mediated analysis in mathematics) requires fundamental rethinking while teaching using video conferencing systems. Recognizing and agenda-setting the need for differentiated training and facilitation due to the diversity of the contexts of use is expected to be established by the service providing roles, for example, IT support and e-learning consultant. The online training modules and training framework will become training resources for the faculty training programs, which will not be limited to the participating institutions only. These outcomes will develop the competence of technological, pedagocial, and content knowledge. Furthermore, the two competence matrices will facilitate the personal development of educators and students regarding the changing role in the online teaching-learning context. The long-term desired outcome is to change the target groups’ perception and behaviour towards “classroom context and engagement first” approaches, acknowledging the diversity of use contexts and signature pedagogy (or subject culture). The practice of classroom context (as large gallery, studio, lab etc.) and learning activity for engaging students in the active learning process will be central in the ideation and technological-pedagogical design. The best case is that no educator, student, and e-learning professional would doubt choosing classroom context and student engagement as the first priority in a pedagogical design for HE online teaching, where the students will bring these skills into their future online teaching-learning practice. The different roles will be able to understand the differences in expectations and thereby understand the differences in expectation gaps, which will enable improved systemic and systematic innovation adoption. The developments that we pursue in the transnational clusters of digital learning technologies for higher education impact all educational programs of HE but priority will be given to STEM and teacher education programs. The disseminated results will be adopted by other educational levels, for instance, K-12 and continuing education.

On of the focus of the Horizon 2020 is on the investment in research and innovation, which is foreseen as essential for Europe’s society aiming to produce Europe as world-class science and technology community that drives economic growth not only in the European geographical area. As part of this effort it is of the foremost importance to bring together European scientists with those from around the world. Building research and innovation capacities is a challenging task and the current project will address this task within the cooperation network of Asian and European partners. The research capacities will be developed at partner higher education institutions in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand through the creation and implementation of the System of the Assessment of Quality and Impact of Research and the development and the introduction of self-contained transferable research skill training modules. Though individual partner universities are at different levels of the research capacities development, all of them strive to embrace the ways towards their improved research performance. The diversity of partner higher education institutions involved in the project (public vs. private, research vs. teaching focused, traditional vs. new, located in the capital city vs. in rural areas, focused on social vs. technical sciences, located in high income vs. medium/lower income countries) allows for addressing the research capacity building goal from diverse perspectives and for achieving necessary synergies in the partnership. The transfer of the best practice and knowledge in the area of research capacities in both ways will provide additional value added for European partners.

The Malaysian wood and furniture industry is one of the major contributors to the Malaysian economy, estimated in nearly €4bn of exports and about 300,000 workers. In fact, in 2017 Malaysia was ranked as the 9th World country in furniture exports and 17th in production. Consequently, the National Timber Industry Policy 2009-2020 established innovation and technology, and human capital development as the main challenges of the industry. Moreover, the blueprint for the Malaysian National Industry 4.0 policy framework is expected to have a focus on the training aspects and update workers knowledgeLikewise, the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025 was launched by the Ministry of Education whose prime aim was to address the mismatch in the supply and demand of graduates, with employers reporting the lack of knowledge, skills and attitudes required in graduatesFollowing all these recommendations, MAKING4.0 will establish a European-Malaysian collaborative consortium integrated by 4 Malaysian and 3 European Universities, the Wood and Furniture Technological Centre of Murcia (Spain), and the Malaysian Timber Industry CouncilMAKING4.0 aims to develop an innovative Master on Industry4.0 technologies for engineers of wood and furniture smart factories that will update High Education and increase competitiveness of the Malaysian manufacturing industryTo achieve this objective, different technical activities will be carried out: 1. Analysis and comparison of the current HE offer and wood industry in Malaysia and Europe 2. Definition of the training path, learning content structure and methodological aspects 3. Development of training materials and guides for trainers 4. Performance of a test analysis to validate and accredit the Master courseAs a final result, MAKING4.0 will procure a new Master in Malaysian universities related to Industry4.0 and the woodworking industry, teached in English and with a high impact on the Malaysian HE and manufacturing industry