Disabled students have limited access to HE in India and Bangladesh. This project aims to tackle this issue by making accessible HE OERs and MOOCs, and personalisation using AI, that will enable better provision of open distance learning for those that experience architectural barriers.DIVERSASIA will build capacity of 2 HEI in India (P2+P3) and 2 HEI in Bangladesh (P4+P5) to integrate these students that have disabilities using know-how and ian nclusive education toolkit developed by experienced inclusive education experts from UK (P1), BG (P6+P10), BE (P11), LV (P8), TR (P7) and RS (P9) including:-DIVERSASIA handbook which will suggest strategies that overcome the issues of inclusion, diversity and cultural differences in 21st century HEIs in Asia.-INNOVATIVE TOOLKIT with guidelines, checklists, best/good practices to implement universal design of learning.-INNOVATIVE ASESSMENT AND VALIDATION STRATEGY for OERs (SCORM) and MOOCs to review and assess their level of accessibility and to enable further revision to reach certain accessibility level. THE PROJECT RESULTS AND IMPACT WILL ENSURE THE PROVISION OF:- Inclusive education guidelines consisting of flexible, broad educational and extracurricular options.- Student-centred, personalised/individualized instruction and course selection based on assessment of engagement using AI technologies.- All written materials including OERs and MOOCs which are provided to students will be validated and further enhanced based on guidelines and recommendations provided by a dedicated toolkit.- Participating universities from India and Bangladesh (and through their national networks for dissemination and exploitation) will become fully accessible in terms of provision of digital content - this will further enable the improvement of distance courses that will allow students with disabilities to access HE (especially those that experience architectural and physical barriers to access in HE).

Deltas are economic and environmental hotspots, food baskets for many nations, and home to a large portion of the world population. They sustain rich, biodiverse ecosystems and related services. Most deltas are also international and regional transportation hubs that support intense economic activity. Yet, deltas are deteriorating at an alarming rate due to climate impacts (e.g., sea level rise and flooding), human-induced catchment changes (e.g., water and sediment flow reduction), and local exploitation (e.g., sand, groundwater, and hydrocarbon extraction). The international science community recognizes the need to develop a solid knowledge base for protecting these vulnerable coastal systems, and this BF initiative leads the way by coordinating and enhancing innovative international work towards the development of a science-based framework for delta sustainability. The project will develop a versatile modeling framework that may be applied from local to national levels to evaluate the unique functioning, critical stressors, and vulnerability of the world’s deltas. The framework will ingest social, economic, physical and ecosystem data into an open-access repository and will allow planners to model and deliver optimized, viable solutions for their region. In areas for which detailed data are sparse, an infrastructure for critical data gathering will be developed and modeling and prediction tools will be customized. The framework will initially be applied to three case-studies for which local and regional partnerships are already in place, including the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM), Mekong, and Amazon deltas. The team represents the BF-G8 countries: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Norway, India, Japan, UK, and USA, and includes partners in the Netherlands, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. It is composed of government and university researchers, and NGO’s, working closely with policymakers. The training of graduate students and post-docs able to work across disciplinary boundaries and countries will also be a unique legacy of the project.

Engineering has a pivotal role to play in solving humanitarian challenges, enabling communities to progress towards sustainable development. Because the issues of humanitarianism are not just engineering problems, there is need to introduce new designs of engineering education to embrace and exploit combinational expertise in community-based engineering. ENHANCE aims at nurturing humanitarian attributes through engineering education for serving unsupported communities effectively and responsibly, in identifying problems and defining sustainable solutions. The novelty of ENHANCE lies in integrating highly diverse, yet complementary, expertise in engineering Higher Education (HE). The objectives of the project involve: (a) mapping professional attributes for mitigating humanitarian challenges over the next 15 years; (b) assessing and evaluating current graduate engineering programmes in Partner Institutions under the enablers needed to ensure humanitarian attributes to graduates; (c) setting up tools for evaluating graduate engineering programmes; (c) building capacity in the field of community-based engineering with interventions in curriculum content, assessment and feedback, methods of delivery; (d) tasting, adopting and implementing in current curricula innovative (i.e. inclusive, interdisciplinary, problem-based) teaching and learning methodologies; (e) developing and testing the ENHANCE Training Kit for staff development/training. Outputs of the project will be disseminated to audiences from HE educators and students in the partner countries; modern media (podcasts, video’s, etc.) will be utilised to share insights with a wide audience. ENHANCE will allow us to ensure advancement of community-based engineering directly to a range of Official Development Assistance (ODA) recipients and to instigate longer-term developments with beneficiaries and end users. Nevertheless, outputs of this project will be applicable to many other countries facing global challenges.