The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on higher education (HE) and international study programmes. The sudden shift to online teaching and learning brought about challenges at different levels, from competences and pedagogies, to teaching and learning tools, collaborative work and quality assurance. In this context, Joint Programme (JP) coordinators, managers, teachers and students have been among the hardest-hit HE players. By their nature, JPs are international collaborative programmes built on physical mobility of students and teachers, joint, inter-cultural and trans-national processes and activities. Due to the pandemic, JP had to respond quickly to avoid disruption in program activities.Responding to the EC Digital Action Plan (2021-2027) and priorities of the Erasmus+ Call Partnerships for Digital Educational Readiness, the main objective of the project is to contribute to the development of a digitalized, innovative and quality-oriented HE, by providing instruments to sustainably mainstream new forms of virtual teaching and learning into the degree courses beyond risk-mitigation approaches. This will be done by focusing specifically on JP, felt to be a perfect laboratory where different innovative pedagogies, tools and resources can be tested and experimented.As the name suggests, GO-DIJIP will be a call to Action inviting approx. 150 JP coordinators, managers, teachers to explore & share existing practices and innovative learning & teaching methodologies; develop their digital skills; integrate digital collaborative environments into JP; collaborate trans-nationally towards quality digital education. Students (up to 25 directly involved) will also play a key role in this all-round innovation process by bringing in the end-users perspective and supporting staff members in assessing key needs, priorities, and values when innovating HE programmes. Finally, Partner HEIs, Networks and, indirectly National/European authorities, will be called to reflect around the importance of adjusting policy frameworks so to allow a smoother and more effective and inclusive transition to digital collaboration in HE.The project be framed around a set of well-defined, realistic and consecutive Intellectual Outputs responding to the specific objectives outlined above, i.e.:•IO1 - AMPLIFIER open collaborative platform will effectively contribute to the sharing and amplifying of best practices & tools related to the digital transformation and integration of JP. It will be designed to provide inspiration for teaching with technology through open access to pioneering practices and projects of particular relevance to JP. As important, it will explore and develop digital spaces for student led production of knowledge in JP •IO2 - APLIFIER contributions will serve as a base to select the best practices for shooting 4 video-testimonials (IO2). They will serve as “tracks of pedagogical practices” that can be transferred and adapted to other contexts in a transversal way, contributing to inspire and raise awareness on the potential and benefits of new forms of virtual education•IO3 - The GO-DIJIP Online Staff Training Course (IO3) will be the core of the project. The course will respond to these needs of JP practitioners by developing an open, technology-sustained, experiential training course focused on how to best integrate digital environments into JP. First a Pilot Training Course targeting approx. 20-25 JP academic and administrative staff members at Partner HEI will be tested. The course will be complemented by a face-to-face training workshop. Based on participatory feedback, an Open Training Course targeting approx. 50 external HEI partners and stakeholders will be developed. •IO4 Previous activities will lead to the creation of a digital Handbook and Policy Recommendations in order to reach a different target and encourage a digital transformation not only with a bottom-up push, but also guided and supported by policy makers.Outputs and results will be disseminated and multiplied extensively during two Multiplier Events, as well as during internal and external events of Partners, Associated Partners and Networks.All project activities are designed to be carried out collaboratively and transnationally, by involving the different practitioners in the field (academics, administrators, students, HEIs governance bodies, etc..) and applying the most advanced teaching/learning technologies in the field. Through this transnational partnership, the project aims to align digital skills, promote common standards and quality guidelines to respond to a sustainable transition to quality digital education. In the long term, GO-DIJIP outputs are expected to contribute to innovate the HE sector, with a specific focus on JP; to make HE more inclusive and accessible through structured and effective digitalization; to integrate such innovative elements and approaches into the wider national policies.

The COVID-19 emergency had a dramatic impact on students mobility flows, but at the same time can be a great innovation leverage for European universities to rethink students mobility in innovative ways, both regarding the use of digital technology to complement and enrich traditional mobility, and to use mobility to build important soft skills such as intercultural communication, teamwork and critical thinking. To do so, universities need to develop the capacities to design and implement blended mobility schemes that are inclusive and intercultural, and to integrate and accredit blended mobility activities as a stable component of the academic offer.The FRAMES project aims to foster an harmonised implementation and accreditation of blended mobility among European HEIs, making the European Higher Education Area more innovative and resilient and helping universities to move from the COVID-19 emergency to sustainable innovation.The project will do so by promoting a specific online collaboration methodology called Virtual Exchange (VE), a practice that consists of sustained, technology-enabled, people-to-people online exchange sessions in which constructive communication and interaction takes place with the support of educators or facilitators. The VE methodology has proven to work as a synergistic and complementary component of physical exchange programmes, showing that it can prepare, deepen, and extend physical exchanges, and now it is high time to work to facilitate the integration of this approach in the daily mobility activities of as many EU universities as possible.To achieve its aim, the FRAMES project will:1) valorise successful scenarios of accredited Virtual Exchanges, considered as an innovative, inclusive and intercultural complement to physical mobility; 2) build capacity of European HEIs to integrate and accredit Virtual Exchange as a key component of their mobility activities, towards a more inclusive and sustainable internationalisation;3) support HEIs, European Universities and HEI Networks in creating the conditions for long term harmonised integration and accreditation of physical, blended and virtual mobility.The project is led by the Mediterranean UniUNIMED and involves two leading organisations in the Virtual Exchange field (UniCollaboration and the Sharting Perspective Foundation), three universities (Girona, Siena and Limerick) as well as some associated partners such as the Erasmus Students Network and the Network of Public Catalan Universities.

The project pour une Professionnalisation des Enseignants utilisant le Numérique pour un Soutien à l’Autonomie et à la citoyenneté (PENSA) adresses two current issues in higher education and society. The first one is the need for training and infrastructure to deliver blended, distant and/or co-modal (i.e. in-class teaching simultaneously streamed to online students) teaching during the pandemic. During the national lockdowns and when delivering co-modal teaching, teachers often turned to mainstream online platforms such as Zoom without being aware of the economic model of such platforms in terms of treatment of personal data. Moreover, some teachers reproduced face-to-face frontal approaches online, without considering the potentialities of blended learning to centre education on the student combining asynchronous individual activities and synchronous collaborative ones, in addition to frontal lecturing. The second issue is the need to educate youngsters to the implications in the use of social networking websites (Facebook, Youtube, etc.) at the psychological, sociological, economical, and ideological levels. In fact, the deployment of these platforms was accompanied by discourses of emancipation, were users were able to express and exchange their ideas online, thus generating more public dialogue. The reality shows a different picture, characterised, among others, by hate speech and racism, the raise of populism, echo chambers and sometimes illegal surveillance. Hence the need to raise students’ awareness about the logics embedded in those platforms.The PENSA project addresses these issues with an overall approach of openness, both in the direction of open education and open source platforms. The core of the project is constituted by 30 teachers and teacher trainers in seven universities, mostly part of the CIVIS European University, one academic association and a firm. During the project, we aim at providing training for these teachers and to reach 100 supplementary teachers with local training events. Teachers will be trained to integrate blended and co-modal teaching in their classes, with the integration of telecollaboration and virtual exchange on topics related to digital citizenship. The core group will implement virtual exchange adopting either the pedagogy of inquiry, or a collaborative creative writing approach. Through these actions, PENSA will involve 400 students across Europe in developing their digital competence, plurilingual competence, collaborative skills, and learner autonomy.The intellectual outputs of the PENSA project will be: a literature review on teacher training for the integration of ICTs and for education to digital citizenship; an open course for teacher training for the pedagogic activities described above; two sets of open educational resources to implement virtual exchange adopting either the pedagogy of inquiry or collaborative creative writing; open source functionalities for open source platforms for teaching and training, such as Moodle, BigBlueButton and Mahara, to make those platforms more interoperable and to adapt them to co-modal teaching.The estimated results will be an increased digital readiness in higher education, a contribution to sustainable internationalisation providing guidelines to stakeholders for increasing virtual exchange and virtual mobility, and above all the contribution to a culture of openness both among teachers for open education, and among students for open digital citizenship, reducing the part of commercial platforms in higher education.

The VAMOS project brings together universities from Europe, Brazil and Honduras to facilitate an exchange of good practice in the field of Education for Sustainable Development. The overall objective is to strengthen university education for addressing SDG challenges in society through virtual exchange and joint international learning and teaching. The project will focus on 3 main aspects (development work packages): In a first step, we will bring together ESD teachers from all partners to discuss and evaluate methods of ESD and transformative education. In a second step, will organize training for virtual teaching and virtual exchange. In a third step, we will co-create and test a Virtual Exchange course on Wicked Problems with students and teachers from all partner universities. In addition, the project will organize two ESD Dialogue Forums in Brazil and Honduras to connect the project with stakeholders outside the partner universities in LATAM. In a broader sense, the project aims to develop solutions for a more sustainable form of internationalisation.