EPISODE aims to empower continuing vocational education and training providers to enhance the resilience, digital readiness, and growth of social entrepreneurship, micro-businesses, MSMEs, and early-stage start-ups in Palestine, with a focus on producing public prosperity. This will be achieved by defining future skills needed for social entrepreneurs in the digital era, aligning such skills to the local unique Palestinian context. The project will upskill teachers/trainers and mentors on innovative tools, online teaching techniques and pedagogies, cutting-edge technologies and trends in digital social entrepreneurship, and it will involve them in co-creating a blended course on Digital Social Entrepreneurship. The course will be piloted with youth who aspire to become entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs and early startups, empowering them to use digital transformation tools and models in order to either expand and improve their operations, or to initiate a social enterprise.The EPISODE approach will be available for the public and transferable in interested institutions and organisations that are willing to reinforce capacity and attractiveness of continuing vocational education. Moreover, the project will provide an open online microlearning unit on Digital Social Entrepreneurship, that will be available to all interested organisations and learners in English and Arabic.The project will be implemented by UNIMED, the Mediterranean Universities Union, Birzeit University, An-Najah National University, BuildPalestine, and ALL DIGITAL. The duration of the project is two years.

PaLib address two problems. 1) the scarce resources to the Palestinian academic institutions due to limited resources within one UNIV and the physical access to it due to the geographical disconnected areas in PS. 2)the lack of a unified portal of research and researchers that includes all the research produced by the Palestinians which poses different issues toward enhancing the research infrastructure. Hence, local UNIV needs are: 1)Widening the availability of literatures for both students and academics. 2)Building research networks. 3)Allowing international databases to consider the developed research portal. 4)Building Palestinian research identity. 5)enhancing student workspace in PS libraries. The following main outcomes are expected: 1)Unified e-library portal. 2)Research repository for the staff. 3)Staff training as assets. 4)National electronic research publishing consortium. Since PaLib has been targeting the infrastructure of higher education, PaLib will impact six main categories: 1)Students: the project will expand the academic and research resources for all students. PaLib eliminates the problem of disconnect areas in PS. 2)Librarians: the project will deliver a high training level for librarian on Palestinian universities. 3)Local researchers: local researchers will be able to connect through the platform to access other research items that they couldn’t before deploying the platform. 4)International researchers: the project will help Palestinian and European partners to exchange research outputs through the platform and it will be one step towards globalizing the Palestinian research activities. 5)The Ministry of Higher education MOE: will have a good vision on the future of research and development on PS and help plan the future strategies of higher education in PS. 6) The Ministry of Culture: to install rules and regulations that support electronic research publishing in PS.

<< 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.

"<< Objectives >>Cultural heritage has a clear European dimension which calls for joint action at European level. An integrated and participatory approach to cultural heritage is at the core of the European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage. This is essential in order to promote cultural heritage across EU policies (https://culture.ec.europa.eu/cultural-heritage)."" The Memory of History Project"" aims to digitize, store and transmit manuscripts to wider environments and future generations.<< Implementation >>To achieve stipulated objectives of the project proposal, both physical and virtual transnational project meetings will be carried out. Learning, teaching and training activities will be carried out both virtually and physically through intercultural, informal and non-formal educational approaches. Workshops and work packages will be implemented. Dissemination activities such as exhibitions and international symposiums will be carried out to disseminate results to wider environments.<< Results >>Project aims to compile and digitize the manuscripts to a digital book, create a digital library in web form incorporating the digital books that incorporate those manuscripts. A documentary of all process of project and all work packages will be created. Lastly, a mobile applications incorporate digital books, digital library, manuscripts will be created. Results of the project will be disseminated through exhibitions in the country of partner organisations and also an international symposium."