Higher education governance and its autonomy is strongly enhanced by the effective and convincing accountability, transparency and financial sustainability. Discussions on the university governance and autonomy throughout HEIs in Europe are coming as a response to diverse challenges at the different country’s context. As a result, the need for gaining and enhancing public trust in higher education became manifest to develop appropriate forms of transparency and accountability of both public and private institutions. An initiative to form a consortium came as response to address these challenges through the project Strengthening university autonomy and increasing accountability and transparency of Western Balkans Universities /STAND project .The concept entails investing in the strengthening the mechanisms that ensures the long-term sustainability of university autonomy, transparency and accountability. The project foresees cooperation between HEIs in the WB region, their respective ministries and program country partners and contributes to the increasing of professional capacities of HEI staff in partnering HEIs. As structural project it will support reflecting on standards at EU partners and enhancing them at WB institutions through intensified regular academic and management exchange of good practice and sustainable networking between EU-WB partners. A mix of bottom-up and top-down approach that will be used in the project, fosters the dialogue between universities and ministries, and thus enables the consortium to contribute more effectively to the project implementation and sustainability to strengthen the autonomy of Western Balkans higher education institutions. The project aims to reach up to 50,000 persons engaged in higher education and other related activities in Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro and abroad through its dissemination activities.

The aim is to provide practical solutions to help close the gap between industry needs/expectations and educational system outputs, by creating a STE(A)M education master programme. The later will train in-service and future educators at all levels of education to implement STEAM-related courses in the target countries. Innovative learning material and services will be also developed offering educators a multidisciplinary perspective and participating universities the chance to exchange best practises, modernize, renew and align their curricula towards multidisciplinary skills and competencies necessary for rapidly changing job markets.In this context, the consortium will transfer significant know how from the European Educational System that will be used by the partner country Institutions to design an advanced MSc Curriculum for STE(A)M education. The absence of such a degree makes the need for its design and introduction pressing and the consortium envisages that this effort will spearhead similar endeavors in other Western Balkan countries. The Master’s Programme combines the diversity of expertise of leading European Universities and offers education oriented to a multidisciplinary understanding through the involvement of experts from complementary fields.The aim of this MSc programme is to enhance future and in-service educators, in order to:• develop a broad theoretical base reflecting current cutting edge research in STE(A)M education• comprehend and demonstrate specialised knowledge and skills in cross-disciplinary approaches• choose and use appropriate methods for active learning while teaching STE(A)M• design, develop and evaluate curricula and materials for STE(A)M-related courses• equip with the knowledge and skills to solve complex workplace problems and find flexible, intelligent, innovative solutions at the professional level• identify, design and implement effective STE(A)M-related training and development programmes

The overall goal of this project is to improve higher education provision in Kosovo and Albania, by building institutional capacity for international relations whereby establishing or making fully functional respective offices (including capacity for project cycle management) in all nine Kosovo and five Albanian consortium members. This project will build institutional capacity for the internationalization of HE in Kosovo and Albania, by improving capacity for project development and management through international expertise made available by European HEIs partnering in this project and exchange of good practice between the consortium members. This will make way for local higher education institutions to engage confidently in various academic and research cooperation initiatives in the region, in Europe and wider.The aim of the project is establish and develop fourteen fully functional offices of international cooperation that will also include the function of project cycle management. Currently, none of the new public universities in Kosovo and Albania has the capacity to fully run an International Cooperation Office, at a time when over 50% of students in European Higher Education institutions are studying or participating in one or another form of international studies and when a significant part of university life takes place in the form of various exchanges and mobilities. This makes it of paramount importance to build respective capacity for all members. This will ultimately contribute substantially to the quality of provision and will enrich university life and experiences of the student population in Kosovo and Albania. Therefore, having in mind the possibility of Erasmus + project to support this idea, we initiated the work as a consortium on developing this idea. The project will have very high importance in addressing increasing isolation, lack of quality international cooperation and lack of project initiatives from Kosovo and Albania universities.

The project aims at enhancing quality of design and delivery of initial teacher education (ITE) towards increasing the professionalism bar for teaching profession in Kosovo through the implementation of European-inspired quality assurance mechanism that produce teacher professionalism aspired by teaching profession in Kosovo. The two important concepts in this project are 1) internal quality assurance mechanism in Initial Teacher Education (including but not limited to program review, organised monitoring, collecting feedback from students on quality of teaching and learning resources, review of quality of student services, review of managerial practices including staff policies, review of research activity etc, and 2) the development of teacher professionalism. The project makes the link in a way that the proposed internal quality assurance mechanism needs to contribute to the achievement of the desired professionalism in school system. The desired professionalism is referred to the policy set up for the teaching profession which the internal quality assurance system needs to contribute to. In addition, in order to achieve a quality culture in initial teacher education, the project supports the development of management skills and practices to manage internal quality assurance as well as development of teacher educator competencies to be able to deliver quality courses (specified in quality indicators for teaching in teacher education) that are in line with the expectations of professionalism in teaching profession and at the service of school reform. In order to address this, the project provides capacity building and resources for teacher educators and managers of initial teacher education. In this way the project brings all stakeholders together to link to the development of a quality culture in teacher education in Kosovo.

The disabled, stigmatized, chronically ill and elderly people in Kosovo are being served with allied health services of low quality level, often worsening their already limited capacities to cope with everyday life. The existing educational offers are failing to develop necessary competences needed to deliver better services. The aim of this Project is to enhance the development of research and innovation capacities in the area of allied health through education in line with the Bologna process in collaboration with clients, professionals, business, academic, industry, and governmental authorities. The main pedagogical strategy utilized during the Project is multidisplinary co-configuration. Consortium consists of 3 HEIs, 1 ministry and 2 NGOs from Kosovo and 2 HEIs from Finland and 1HEI from Turkey. The latter are specialized in multidisciplinary collaboration and modern pedagogy, innovation and entrepreneurship in the area of allied health. The project reaches its goals through establishing the SMAHPC, teacher training and development of CPD courses.The outputs and results are: - Clear and practical definitions of the research and innovation competences of allied health professionals - An innovation and research conducive student-run multidisciplinary allied health practice center - Eight continuous professional development (CPD) courses: one top-up course for teachers and seven for students/stakeholders on EQF levels 5, 6 and 7, and a digital platform to support the implementation of the courses.- Teacher and student handbooks, course plans and other relevant teaching and learning material.- Regional, national and international networks for disseminating and sustaining the work for development of research and innovation capacities in allied healthThe main impacts are improvement of the education environment, introduction of new learning methods, development of new and high quality allied health services/products, and new investment opportunities.