<< Background >>The pandemic has revealed a number of important shortcomings in instructional design, teaching methodologies and student assessment. Higher education institutions have long been seen as the source of all knowledge. Teachers are responsible for transmitting this knowledge to students so that they can achieve the learning objectives they set for themselves. This process, which at first sight seems simple, is not so simple. This instructional design must be carried out according to standards set by each institution and country. Sometimes, the bureaucracy that this system imposes means that the objectives are not achieved by the teaching staff. This leads to frustration on the part of teachers who have devoted much time and effort to rigorous and quality teaching. On the other hand, students also suffer dissatisfaction in this whole process, since at the end of their higher education process, they have to face a labour market that demands flexibility, proactivity and adaptation to new conditions of the environment. The pandemic experienced during the last year has only aggravated the situation that higher education institutions were already suffering. Universities had to transform their entire infrastructure in record time to adapt to the new teaching reality. The training centres devoted enormous amounts of time to developing training courses for their professors. Students had to adapt to new teaching methodologies to which they were not accustomed. Some even lacked the technical infrastructure to follow the normal functioning of classes. In short, the pandemic revealed a situation that had been brewing in universities for years. For the most part, these institutions adopted a reactive attitude to change with the improvisation that this often entailed. Within a week, each institution had to transform its face-to-face teaching, which already had significant shortcomings in terms of instructional design, to hybrid or online teaching. The results of these actions are well known to all. On the one hand, teachers complained of a major limitation on how to adapt their content, methodology and infrastructure to the new times. On the other hand, students suffered the frustration of being locked at home without being able to interact with teachers and other students. A year after the beginning of the pandemic, it would be expected that the situation would have changed, but it is far from the desired situation. As a result of analysis and reflection on the part of the members of this project, it has been found that the situation is still not ideal. After one year, the teaching staff continues to adopt a reactive stance towards the design of instruction, without taking into account the change of paradigm that the transformation to a hybrid or online system, where information technologies have taken on special relevance, entails. Based on the meetings held between the members of the consortium, we are committed to reversing the situation and changing the approach that universities must adopt in the face of the frequent changes they are facing. This requires a proactive approach, anticipating changes in higher education and adapting to them if necessary. To achieve this, this project has planned 3 major milestones: 1) the creation of a database, based on a questionnaire addressed to teachers and students, to find out the factors that have an impact on the quality of teaching, 2) the design of a computer application with an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to anticipate the design of the instruction by the teacher and is fed back with the suggestions of the students, 3) the development of a protocol to design and create innovation labs where you can practice, create collaborative and creative spaces that allow practices with innovative teaching methodologies.<< Objectives >>For this reason, our project proposes a series of three objectives to resolve this situation. Firstly (PR1), we intend to develop a database to analyse the factors that have the greatest impact on the quality of teaching by area of knowledge in different countries. This first objective is essential to understand in depth the problem that each higher education institution faces in their respective countries. To this end, each of the participants will distribute a questionnaire in each of their institutions to collect this information on both faculty and students. The data obtained will be analysed using advanced statistical techniques. The aim is to delve deeper into those teaching methodologies, technological tools or administrative processes that are hindering the correct design of instruction by teachers. The results obtained will be fundamental to lay the foundations for the next objective of the project. Secondly (PR2) and based on the results obtained in PR1, a very innovative computer tool will be designed, which we have called ConnectU. This application will use an artificial intelligence system to guide teachers in the design of instruction. In this sense, the data obtained in PR1 will allow the application to be designed in line with the reality of each university in each country. In addition, it will allow the teaching-learning process to be improved in higher education institutions. On the other hand, students will be able to incorporate their teaching needs into the application so that they can be incorporated by the application and linked to the instructional design. The main novelty of ConnectU will be its proactive approach, anticipating and planning tools, technologies and instruction. This is a very important innovation compared to other existing tools, which take a reactive stance and simply summarise a set of tools without taking into account the teacher and the student. Furthermore, thanks to the algorithm that will be developed by the project team and the artificial intelligence that will be incorporated into ConnectU, our tool will feed back and adapt to changes in the academic environment. Finally (PR3), the consortium of this project will transfer everything learned in the previous steps to create innovations labs in each of the institutions. Traditionally, university faculty have had to implement teaching initiatives through a process of trial and error. This is not at all advisable as it implies using grade or post grade courses as a field of experimentation with students. To this end, a protocol will be jointly designed to lay the foundations for what these innovations labs should be like. Collaborative spaces for learning, co-creation, creativity and testing of new teaching methodologies. Each of the institutions of the consortium will build these innovation labs in their respective universities by following this protocol. Several experiments will be conducted in each innovation labs to improve them. Similarly, the protocol to create each innovation labs will be revise to that it can be transferred to anyt other institution. This initiative is completely new, as currently most teachers have to implement their educational innovation projects in the classroom with unsatisfactory results, as the different members of this consortium have found. This is demotivating for the teaching staff, who see all the effort they have put into applying teaching innovation frustrated. It also leads to dissatisfaction among students, who have problems assimilating essential concepts in their training. Undoubtedly, innovation labs will bring about a revolution, improving the satisfaction of teachers and students.<< Implementation >>To implement these objectives, the consortium members will work together on a series of activities to realise 1. the database affecting the quality of teaching, 2. ConnectU application and 3. the Innovation labs in higher education institutions. The database will be developed on the basis of a pre-tested questionnaire and scales recognised in the literature. From this questionnaire it will be possible to create a database with the detected teaching difficulties. These results can be implemented in any higher education institution to warn of potential problems in the teaching and learning process. Both the questionnaire and the procedure followed to create the database will be made available to any university interested in collecting such information. The ConnectU application will be developed according to free and open software principles, which will allow its integration with any content management system of higher education institutions. This will allow any university interested in launching this application to implement it regardless of its existing IT system or infrastructure. Together with the application, the consortium will produce an instruction manual and examples on how to integrate the ConnectU application in higher education institutions. A series of demonstration videos will be recorded on the use of the ConnectU application demonstrating how the artificial intelligence system is fed back with input from teachers and students. These tutorials will facilitate the implementation of the tool by any higher education institution interested in implementing it. Regarding the innovations labs, a creation protocol will be drawn up that will cover both the infrastructure needs and the personnel required to set it up. This will allow an easy implementation in any institution wishing to create its own innovation lab in a short period of time. Together with the protocol, available in open access, a series of videos will be recorded demonstrating the functioning of each innovation lab in each university. The consortium members hope that these videos will serve to motivate other higher education institutions to design and create these creative spaces for teachers and students to interact. In addition, this project has a high potential for transferability to other educational environments such as primary and secondary schools and training centres. Through slight modifications of the algorithm and video tutorials, the ConnectU application can be implemented in any other educational institution. It will also be possible to transfer the knowledge acquired in the innovation labs to other educational institutions that require this space to implement their teaching innovation initiatives.<< Results >>The results of this project are ambitious, but they will undoubtedly provide a solution to the problems currently faced by higher education institutions, which we have highlighted in the previous sections. The tangible results of the database, the ConnectU tool and the innovation labs will help to improve the design of instruction in European universities and to adapt to future changes. However, in order to verify that the results achieved are in line with those planned by the consortium members, a series of checks will be carried out. Firstly, a series of satisfaction questionnaires will be distributed to teachers and students to find out how useful the ConnectU application and the Innovation Labs have been to them in the teaching and learning process. The results obtained in this questionnaire will be analysed to check that the results expected and set by the entities participating in this project have been achieved. If necessary, corrective measures will be established both in the ConnectU application and in the protocol for the creation of the innovation labs. Finally, the ultimate goal of this project is to improve the quality of teaching in higher education institutions. To this end, once the project has been completed, a comparative analysis will be carried out between the opinions that students had before the implementation of the project and the results obtained after the implementation of the ConnectU application and the Innovation Labs in each institution. As in the previous case, this will allow errors to be debugged and improvements to be made for the future. Nevertheless, the members of the consortium are convinced that the results of the ConnectU application and the innovation labs are necessary to improve the education centres to the business and social reality of the countries.