"The key objective of the TICRUZ consortium is to enhance capacity for international cooperation between universities in Latin America’s least developed regions and HEIs in EU countries, by facilitating transfer of knowledge and best practice in transparency and credit recognition. Furthermore it aims at promoting the exchange of knowhow and good practices among the partnership HEIs, thus creating IT’s tools in the management of mobility programmes as a part of a future internationalization strategy that may positively contribute to their development. This project will capitalize on the strengths of existing partnership, Erasmus Mundus CRUZ DEL SUR. It consists of 10 full member HEIs, targeting a total of 6 countries, 3 in Latin America: Honduras, Panama and Argentina; and 3 in Europe: Spain, Latvia and Portugal. Most of the Latin American HEIs (4 from 6) are situated in vulnerable areas (Less Developed Regions), into which the project intends to make a big impact. EU HEIs will play an extremely important role in the mobility implementation considering the experience gained during the last 30 years within the scope of Erasmus. The internationalization and modernisation of the Latin American HEI's for the comprehensive development constitutes the project backbone through the stenghthening of the International Relations Offices by means of training seminars focused on ""Academic Recognition"" and ""Informatics Tools for Mobility Management"". The transfer of know-how will be essential, in order to achieve a credit transfer system and to facilitate the study recognition in this Region. This project responds to the necessity of finding new and innovative solutions for the reinforcement of internationalization strategies of higher education institutions individually and potentially at national and regional level."

There has been an increased interest in science and engineering education due to: (1) the shortage of professionals required in scientific and technical areas; (2) the considerable low ratio of students opting for science- and engineering-related degrees, when entering higher education; and (3) the number of dropouts exhibited in the initial years of undergraduate studies. All stakeholders have devoted a great deal of attention and concern to this problem, considering the high number of reports published about and initiatives taken in recent years. In sum, the solutions have been dealing with: raising the society awareness for such a problem (1); increasing the interest for STEM among youngsters (1 and 2); and, promoting new teaching and learning methodologies, especially student-centred ones involving the use of ICT-tools, for coping with a new generation of digital natives (3).This project targets the broad area of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and, within it, the subject of circuit theory and practice. It aims to define, develop and evaluate a set of educational modules comprising hands-on, virtual, and remote experiments, the later supported by a remote lab named Virtual Instruments Systems In Reality (VISIR). The nature of each experiment (hands-on, virtual, real-remote) has an impact on the students’ perception of circuits’ behaviour, being therefore mandatory to understand how these different learning objects can be arranged together in order to scaffold their understanding and increase their laboratory-based skills. This is the concern of the underpinning teaching and learning methodology, favouring in particular the students’ autonomy for discovering how circuits work, through an enquiry-based approach.VISIR+ brings together the power of the best remote lab for experiments with electrical and electronics circuits and the long history of collaboration among the consortium partners from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Portugal Spain, and Sweden.