E-TALEB is a structural project aiming at developing Lebanese Professional Standards in Teaching and Learning and cooperating for innovation and exchange of good practices and experiences relevant to similar frameworks established in Europe.The main objective of this project is to support the initial and continuing professional development of staff engaged in teaching and foster dynamic approaches to teaching and learning through creativity, innovation and continuous development in diverse academic disciplines and/or professional settings. The project will support in creating a community of researchers in different disciplines who share inter and intra university practices in teaching and learning.E-TALEB will acknowledge the variety and quality of teaching, learning and assessment practices that support and underpin student learning including instructional technology. It will also demonstrate to students and other stakeholders the professionalism that staff and institutions bring to teaching and their support for student learning. As a result, the project will have high national impact, providing at once many outcomes: - Establishing Professional Standards Framework in Teaching & Learning LBPSF;- Offering Post-Graduate Certificate Programme in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education for Faculty members;- Collaborating interuniversity activities centered on training and educational programs; - Creating Centers for Teaching Excellence inside each of the participating universities supporting faculty and students in their teaching and learning activities;- Supporting the universities in their accreditation programs by having a formal process for teaching and learning;- Developing human capital and talented experts in teaching and learning in the participating countries;- Sustaining the competitiveness of the Higher Education field in Lebanon, the Middle East and participating EU countries;- Publishing the Lebanese Journals on Teaching and Learning.

ContextThis project will develop a set of core principles that institutions can use to help them design, construct and develop new learning and teaching spaces. Increasingly, quality assurance in higher education is expanding to include a wide range of aspects of university life that includes buildings and the environment. The physical space of universities has often focused on the activities of learning and teaching. This project would provide a framework for institutions to work within to ensure that they make best use of their resources.ObjectivesThe aim of the project is to develop a set of comprehensive design principles that institutions can draw on to inform the development of new learning spaces. The project aim will be achieved by addressing the following objectives: -To identify the meaning of 'innovative learning and teaching' in different contexts across Europe;-To identify existing policy and practice towards learning and teaching space and related issues across EU and national HE sectors;-To identify policy and practice towards learning and teaching space and related issues in other national HE sectors;-To explore practice and principles in building and developing space in other sectors;-To explore the extent to which QA includes the built environment;-To identify existing practice and principles across the partnership institutions;-To share practice and examples across the partnership;-To highlight examples of good practice in design and development of learning and teaching space.Number and profile of participantsThe partnership will include six institutions from diverse regions of the EHEA and be a small, manageable partnership of institutions which have some notable experience in building and developing learning and teaching spaces. However, it is important that the partnership includes institutions with a variety of experiences as well as engaging different regions, reflecting the huge variations in learning and teaching traditions. Description of activitiesThe principal output of the project will be a set of core principles that institutions can use to help them to design new learning and teaching spaces, whether developing existing buildings or constructing new spaces. This output would need to be built upon two core sets of data: wider, national explorations of policy and practice followed by a series of case studies that explore the issues facing universities in building new learning and teaching spaces, determining what works and what does not work and highlighting good practice.Methodology to be usedThe project will take a pragmatic approach, where each stage of the project is informed by the previous stage. This approach has proved successful in several of our previous EU-funded projects and is logical for the proposed project. The first stage of the project would be to undertake a set of studies to identify policy and practice across national higher education sectors. The second stage of the project would be to focus on the partner institutions and explore what activity is currently in process, what approaches are taken to building new learning and teaching spaces and stakeholder perceptions of the space available to them. These two stages of work would inform the core output of this project, the basic principles of constructing learning and teaching spaces. The resulting output will be piloted and evaluated.ResultsThe key tangible result of this project will be a manual to inform university design to facilitate innovative learning and teaching spaces. Other results will be data relating to the extent and development of innovative learning and teaching space within the EHEA.ImpactThe main impact of the project would be to encourage wider consideration of how the design of learning spaces contributes to the implementation of innovative and effective learning and teaching practice across the EHEA.Potential longer term benefitsThe project will share good practice in facilitating innovative learning and teaching, taking account of the rapid acceleration of technological innovation and how this is driving L&T and student engagement. This could also include relatively new developments such as how learning analytics is contributing to a greater understanding of how learners use resources. In other words, design of learning spaces has to take into account technological development and changes in L&T delivery as well as responding to student engagement evidenced through data collection.

According to widespread belief, in a globalized world of knowledge societies, 'universities are now more important for socioeconomic mobility, for knowledge production, for generating economic and civic leaders, and for pushing innovation and societal self-reflection than in any other time in their history' (J.A. Douglass, 2016, The New Flagship University, Palgrave Macmillan, p. xiii). Therefore, quality assurance (QA) and enhancement in higher education institutions (HEIs), in particular in learning and teaching (L&T) is more important than ever which immediately implies that a need for systematic performance (core) data, performance indicators and Learning Analytics exists. These will allow to balance various stakeholders' requests for 'Smarter Universities' and comprehensive (Digital) Performance Data Management (DPDM), i.e., (digitised) performance monitoring and evaluation including profile-driven quality enhancement and evidence-based strategic governance. The SQELT project aims at establishing a comprehensive L&T core dataset (LTCD) for assessing HEIs' performance quality in L&T. The LTCD shall be based on the general criteria of empirical reliability and relevance for quality enhancement and strategic governance; it shall include data definition, data formats and software-adequacy; operationalization capacity shall be analyzed at least for important selected core data. LTCD includes generic core data relevant to any HEI. At the same time, LTCD will be part of a toolbox from which HEIs can select 'individual' performance data according to their specific strategic profile, mission and vision. The SQELT project will also attempt to identify ('construct') related performance indicators. The integrative LTCD shall be prepared for its use in DPDM, in particular Learning Analytics, including an ethical code of practice. That way, the SQELT project will contribute to the ‘Research on Indicators of Teaching Quality’, and thus to what was recently recommended to the European Parliament: ‘In order to strengthen the role and weight of teaching and learning in international rankings, more research on adequate and internationally comparable indicators for the quality of teaching appears desirable, even necessary. […] Should it be possible to define a set of usable key indicators, the next step would be the creation of a global data collection and feeding into an international database, to be run by trusted international actors, like the EU, the OECD or the UNESCO’ (Wächter, B. et al., 2015, University Quality Indicators: A Critical Assessment. Directorate General for International Policies, p. 78). The results of the SQELT project shall help to ensure HEI stakeholders get maximum benefit from LTCD and DPDM. To this end HEIs should use systems that are designed in consultation with stakeholders; supported by an ethical code of practice; driven by the improvement of performance processes and stakeholder engagement; 'tailored to the particular needs of each institution; embedded in an institution’s strategic plan’ (Higher Education Commission, 2016, From Bricks to Clicks. The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education, Policy Connect, p. iii). The main target groups of the SQELT project are HEIs' actors in L&T and stakeholders interested in L&T quality enhancement - students, parents, employers, HE politics, QA agencies. The SQELT project intends to include as many of these as possible. Since SQELT has the character of a pilot project with limited capacities, however, the focus will pre-eminently be on HEIs including students, teaching staff and internal QA, and secondly on QA agencies and HE politics. The SQELT project builds on available models of DPDM in L&T, an analysis of current literature, own DPDM models and practice of project participants, external experts’ knowledge, and surveys with the project's HEI partners about their assessments of relevance and actual use of performance data and indicators. The LTCD will be developed by conceptual analysis and comparison of the various sources including benchmarking of the partner HEIs and an impact analysis to support inductive development of a reference framework for LTCD. The SQELT Consortium consists of ten institutional partners from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal and United Kingdom, among them eight HEIs, one research centre and one QA agency, who develop, evaluate and apply LTCD. The project has six Transnational Project Meetings and nine Multiplier Events, among them one International Evaluation Workshop, one International Conference and seven Euro-Region Dissemination Workshops. The main outputs will be a Benchlearning Report, LTCD, Evaluation Report, Ethical Code of Practice for Learning Analytics, Manual SQELT LTCD, and, last but not least, peer-reviewed publications of the results.

The EDU-LAB is a comparative European study that systematically examines factors and determinants influencing choices, pathways, and transitions in education and training (E&T) and from E&T to the labour market of young people aged 15-30 years. The focus is on equity and inclusion, and on young people’s participation, progression, and completion of upper secondary and tertiary general education (GE) and professional/vocational education (PVET, at ISCED levels 3-8), as well as on their transitions to and from the labour market. First, EDU-LAB will develop comprehensive models of pathways and transitions per country in the European Education Area (EEA) including their intersectional and largely generic determinants. Second, an efficiency assessment of policies and investments in GE and PVET will be carried out. Third, novel quantitative and qualitative evidence will be provided on how determinants, including policies and investments, contribute to young people’s pathways and transitions, specifically to inclusion and equity, and their participation and completion of GE and PVET. EDU-LAB relies on a mixed-methods approach, with emphasis being placed on secondary quantitative analyses of openly available empirical data and newly collected qualitative empirical data. Specifically, EDU-LAB considers all stakeholders and conducts a systematic literature review, qualitative conceptual analysis, quantitative trend and regression analysis, difference-in-differences analysis, expert interviews and surveys, and qualitative case studies focusing on young people’s voices and based on Research-Practice Partnerships. The following EEA targets are scrutinized: (a) increasing the rate of youth with tertiary education attainment; (b) reducing the share of early leavers from E&T; (c) increasing work-based learning in vocational E&T; (d) increasing the number of students belonging to groups underrepresented in educational fields (e.g., based on gender, ethnic minority, migration, etc.)

With the growth of globalization, education and employability challenges, there is an expanded need to graduate confident future leaders by providing them with the necessary documents supplement to their diploma and helping them highlight on their qualifications acquired from different Higher Education institutions. The right implementation of the project will result in various outputs and products that will promote the Higher Education System in Lebanon. The project could eventually unite universities, graduates, employers and other stakeholders for the sake of delivering a Diploma Supplement that could translate the qualifications and skills of students and refugees graduated from Lebanese Higher Education institutions. These outputs are summarized as follows:- Clear educational objectives and student outcomes for degree programs- Principles for generating a Diploma Supplement similar to the ones adopted in Europe- A national information centre which oversees the Lebanese Diploma Supplements issuance and raises awareness on its benefits to students and refugees- A platform “LEBPASS” that includes the Diploma Supplement module and other related modulesThe envisioned impacts of the project are really promising and listed as follows:1- Sufficient independent data to promote transparency between Lebanese and other Higher education Systems 2- A potential initiative towards recognition of prior learning and pre-university education for all students including refugees willing to resume their university studies in Lebanon3- A clarified common language for the nature, level, context, content and status of university studies in Lebanon4- Role model for Higher Education Systems in the region through the establishment of the LEBPASS platform and the Lebanese National Recognition Information Centre. This project shall be supported by European expertise that is of added value to the implementation process by offering guidance towards best practices adopted in Europe.