The proposed EMJM programme FLOURISH seeks to address the need to provide a meaningful, relevant and balanced education for children growing up in adverse circumstances by focusing on their strengths and building their assets within protective contexts. It plans to address a clear gap in the field, namely the training and education of school teachers and other practitioners so as to be able to empower children and young people with the necessary competencies to deal effectively with the obstacles and challenges in their education and development. This need for practitioners’ education in resilience has been reported across cultures and regions of the world, and FLOURISH will address this need at both European and international levels by providing postgraduate, high quality resilience education for educators and other practitioners. The consortium partners have developed significant expertise in this area, including working on previous relevant EU funded projects, and together with the international expertise of the associated partners, they are very well placed to provide this much needed training. FLOURISH is the first international, Joint Master Degree in Resilience in Educational Contexts led by a consortium of 4 degree awarding partners and six associated partners. It is a two-year, full-time programme consisting of taught study-units, a practice placement, a dissertation, and a summer school, spread over four mobility moves. It will provide a showcase of good practice in capacity building and continuing professional education, integrating theory and practice within a strengths based, systemic perspective to education and human development. It becomes particularly pertinent and meaningful in the post-COVID-19 pandemic context, as more attention and priority is being given to mental health, wellbeing and resilience in education

<< Objectives >>The aim of this project is to work together to develop the consideration of sustainable forestry practices in education. The best way to promote forestry in an economically, ecologically, socially and culturally sustainable way is to think about both the content of training and training methods simultaneously. One important method in this project is VR technology, which can be used to create a basis for discussion on measures to be taken in the forest environment.<< Implementation >>In addition to project meetings and project management (A1), the activities include the project consortium's key online workshops (A2), which deal with SFM aspects, teaching and learning technologies. The general webinars and seminars of the project (A3) present all the results obtained during the project and plans for the future. The project will also implement small-scale piloting of virtual reality (VR) in sustainable forestry training (A4).<< Results >>* During the project, a study of the types of practices related to SFM training will be conducted* Identify what training content should be developed to achieve European goals of sustainable forestry* Find out what technical learning and teaching solutions have already been made and what should be done* Explore the added value of a VR-based solution for SFM training* Plan for the implementation of the VR environment in SFM training* Improving the development and training of SFM

MULTITOUCH aims at providing high level training to a new generation of Early Stage Researchers (ESR) in the multidisciplinary field of haptics. We will create an ambitious environment that free their creativity, motivate them for entrepreneurship, and drive them towards thriving careers. We will achieve this by combining hands-on training, involving academic and industrial researchers, bringing the necessary academic knowledge as well as soft-skills, and by facing off research challenges in different sectors of neuroscience, computer science, rehabilitation, human-computer interfaces, multisensory tactile displays and virtual reality. The ambition of MULTITOUCH is to train a cohort of scientific researchers that can work in the R&D department of companies of the digital economy, and that have the skills and will to create devices and applications accessible to everyone. For that purpose, MULTITOUCH develops an approach that intentionally blurs the boundary between assistive and mainstream technologies, and which is supported by the non-academic partner organizations involved in the project. MULTITOUCH will explore how tactile feedback can be integrated with auditory and visual feedback in next-generation multisensory human-computer interfaces (HCI) combining tactile, auditory and visual feedback, such as multisensory tactile displays (TD) and multisensory virtual reality (VR) setups, with the aim of producing an enriched user experience. During the project, the ESRs will improve current knowledge on how touch integrates with the other senses in conditions of active touch, i.e. when tactile input is generated by active contact with the environment (e.g. tactile exploration of the surface of a display, tactile exploration of VR environments). Tools used for introducing more multimodal haptic feedback into HCI will be developed in the project, and made accessible to the scientific community.

<< Background >>The development of a safe and supportive school climate within the classrooms can provide new opportunities for enhancing children’s academic, social, and relational outcomes. In order to facilitate the success of inclusion as an approach and philosophy, it is important that all class members as well as their teachers develop the skills to understand each other, and to communicate and work together effectively. This need is even greater nowadays since we face the layered impact of schools’ closures (e.g., loss of school-based relationships, routines, and learning) due to the Covid-19 pandemic along with its associated impact on the stress and trauma caused to students. The gradual return to schools is emotionally intensive for students and teachers, making more evident the need to enhance our social and emotional competencies and create equitable learning environments.EduCardia is offering an assessment methodology, focusing on assessing and improving socio-emotional competencies of students in primary and secondary educational level. EduCardia tackles both the development of the appropriate social and emotional learning (SEL) material and the development of an online tool (software) that will enable teachers to efficiently apply assessment processes within their classrooms and track the development of socioemotional competencies of students. The main distinguishing point in EduCardia compared to various SEL-oriented activities is that it focuses on the assessment part and the provision of methodologies and tools to facilitate teachers to apply this part within classrooms. Although there is a lot of SEL material available, few methodologies and tools are provided for the assessment part. In EduCardia, assessment processes are going to be assisted by the development of an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tool (Figure 1 in Annex). Through the methodology and the tool provided by EduCardia, teachers will be able to identify at-risk and neglected students in the classroom, potential victims of bullying as well as the existence of cliques. By having access to assessment results of the socio-emotional status of the students, group-based educational activities can be planned to improve the inclusion of the students and promote educational equity. Such activities may be realised in-person or online. In this way, EduCardia is going to facilitate the creation of a safe and supportive school climate (e.g., through SEL activities) that can help prevent bullying and all forms of discrimination and violence and promote learning activities. Moreover, EduCardia will organize and offer training seminars to the teachers, based on the preparation of the appropriate training material and the realisation of a set of training sessions. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, EduCardia consortium has been formulated based on a set of partners coming from interdisciplinary scientific domains. The consortium consists of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) with expertise on the development of ICT solutions to tackle challenges in social sciences, the Faculty of Education at the University of Barcelona (UB) that aims to contribute to solutions to current educational problems, as well as to delve into the scientific foundations of education from an interdisciplinary perspective, the Faculty of Sciences of Education of the Stefan cel Mare University (USV) with expertise in developing SEL-oriented teacher training programs, the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (CPI) with expertise in contributing to the development and validation of assessment methodologies for teachers’ training and the International Network of Emotional Education and Wellbeing (RIEEB) that works on doing evaluative research over aspects related to emotional education.<< Objectives >>EduCardia aims to develop an assessment methodology focusing on assessing and improving socioemotional competencies of students in primary and secondary educational level. EduCardia tackles both the development of the appropriate SEL material and the development of an online tool (software) that will enable teachers to efficiently apply assessment processes within their classrooms and track the evolution of socioemotional competencies of students. EduCardia is going to be based on an existing open-access Emotional Intelligence (EI) model, known as EmoSocio. This model will be revised to be applied to students in primary and secondary schools. The main outcomes of Educardia include the developed methodology, the revised EI model, the online assessment psychometric tool, the SEL material and the results of the application of the methodology in a number of schools in Greece, Spain, Romania and Cyprus. The main objectives of EduCardia are:Objective #1) To develop and validate an assessment methodology for training teachers on SEL teaching strategies and on techniques to assess the socio-emotional competencies of students.Objective #2) To make clear and self-explainable the interpretation of Emotional Intelligence (EI) constructs and models by teachers. This will be achieved through (i) the release of a revised version of the open-access EmoSocio EI model, detailing a set of items and constructs that are applicable for students in primary and secondary schools and (ii) the preparation of the associated SEL training material for teachers.Objective #3) To facilitate teachers to apply the proposed pedagogical methodology in a wide scale and with low entry barriers, based on the development and the release of an open-source psychometric toolkit for assessing and tracking the evolution of socioemotional competencies of students and the development of a set of in-person and online SEL activities.Objective #4) To evaluate the performance of the application of the proposed methodology towards the improvement of individual and group socio-emotional characteristics and to provide documentation with the main lessons learnt, through a set of application scenarios in primary and secondary schools in Cyprus, Spain, Romania and Greece.Objective #5) To disseminate and communicate the results of EduCardia in the Erasmus+ platforms, as well as in the wide network of the EduCardia partners, enabling their adoption by interested parties.<< Implementation >>EduCardia has been formulated based on the identification of challenges in the area of assessment of socio-emotional skills of students. To address these challenges, the following activities are planned.Objective 1 (EduCardia Assessment Methodology). Activities: The EduCardia assessment methodology (Figure 2 in Annex) is going to be defined. The methodology consists of the procedures that are going to be followed by teachers to assess and improve the socio-emotional skills of the students. Based on the methodology, the necessary theoretical background will be provided to teachers to get accustomed with the aspects of emotional intelligence and its positive effects. Furthermore, the methodology aims to facilitate teachers to adopt the material and the tools developed within EduCardia within the pedagogical approach that they follow in their schools.Objective 2 (release of an open-access EI model and SEL training material).Activities: An open-access Emotional Intelligence (EI) model targeted to children (ages from 8-12 and 13-17) is going to be provided, building upon the existing specification of the EmoSocio EI model by NTUA. EmoSocio is selected as a basis since it regards an EI model, enriched with sociometric indexes at an individual and group level. In this way, both the emotional and the social interaction characteristics of the students can be represented in a unified way. To improve explainability and adoption of the model, it will be also made available in a semantically-enriched representation in the form of an Ontology. Furthermore, SEL training material will be produced, considering material that is openly available based on the work of relevant projects or initiatives. This material will be targeted to teachers to acquire more knowledge on the area of emotional intelligence, as well as to get accustomed to the processes for assessing socio-emotional competencies of students within the classrooms.Objective 3 (release of open-source psychometric tool and open-access SEL activities).Activities: EduCardia is going to provide an online open-source psychometric toolkit for assessing the socio-emotional competencies of students. This tool is going to be based on an existing version of the software, called EmoSociograms, that is under development by NTUA. A primary release of the software is already available. Within EduCardia, this software will be customized to support the revised version of the EmoSocio EI model, as well as to be fully applicable in primary and secondary education environments. A pool of SEL activities that can be applied in in-person or online classrooms will be provided through a digital repository. Suggestions for the most suitable activities to be applied per classroom setup will be given to teachers through the psychometric tool.Objective 4 (evaluation and lessons learnt).Activities: In EduCardia, assessment activities are going to take place in in-person and online classrooms in a set of schools in Spain, Romania, Cyprus and Greece. All of the consortium partners have access to networks of schools based on their role and/or a set of existing collaborations in relevant projects. Among others, EduCardia is going to consider schools with high levels of immigrant students, students from roma communities, as well as schools with students with disabilities. Online training workshops for teachers will take place, where the methodology and the usage of the psychometric software tool will be explained in detail. Success stories and lessons learnt will be documented and made openly available.Objective 5 (dissemination and communication).Activities: The produced material and software in EduCardia will be made available as open-access or open-source. This material will be available at the Erasmus+ project results platform, the eTwinning platform and the School Education Gateway. Dissemination workshops are planned for promotion of the results to the educational community and the wide public.<< Results >>EduCardia aims to provide a holistic set of results for tackling assessment of socio-emotional competencies of students, including the toolkit, the training material for teachers, the set of SEL activities, the revised EI model and a set of guidelines. Specifically, the following main outcomes are expected to be produced during the lifetime of EduCardia. Each outcome is associated with a specific project result and the defined objectives (Figure 6 in Annex).Outcome #1: Formulation and description of the assessment methodology to be adopted by teachers for applying SEL teaching strategies and assessing the socio-emotional competencies of students. The methodology is going to include a set of procedures that a teacher can follow to motivate and engage students to actively participate in activities for assessment of socio-emotional competencies, the steps to be followed for the processing and interpretation of the assessment results, as well as the process for the selection and application of targeted SEL activities to students to improve the EI competencies at individual and group level.Result R1: Specification of the EduCardia assessment methodology.Outcome #2: Specification of the revised version of the EmoSocio Emotional Intelligence (EI) model to be applied in students in primary and secondary education. This includes the description of the main EI constructs in personal and group level, the specification of a set of measurement scales and items (questions) to be used for the assessment process, as well as the release of the model in the form of an ontology, supporting better explainability of the adopted terms and semantic alignment with relevant models. Two versions of the EI model are going to be made available, targeted to ages of 8-12 and 13-17 years old.Result R2: Release of the EmoSocio EI Model, including its specification (report), the set of items (questions) and the specification of the ontology (software).Outcome #3: The development of training material for teachers with a two-fold objective: (i) to acquire more knowledge on the area of emotional intelligence (core socio-emotional competencies, importance of EI, collective EI) and (ii) to get accustomed to the processes for assessing socio-emotional competencies of students within the classrooms. Result R3: Development of SEL training material for teachers.Outcome #4: Development of a pool of SEL activities for students. These activities may be in-person, online or hybrid activities. An existing set of activities from related work on the field is going to be used as a basis. The set of activities will be made available through a digital repository.Result R4: In-person and online activities development and provision through a digital repository.Outcome #5: Development and release of an online open-source psychometric toolkit for assessing the socio-emotional competencies of students. The tool is going to support the visualization of social graphs enriched with emotional intelligence traits at individual and group level, the recommendation of personalized SEL activities per group and the production of custom reports at individual and group level.Result R5: Release of the open-source psychometric toolkit (EmoSociograms) and the relevant documentation.Outcome #6: Production of a set of evaluation results and lessons learnt, based on the assessment studies in the schools in primary and secondary education.Result R6: Documentation of evaluation results, lessons learnt and success stories.In addition to the above, a numerous set of activity reports have been pinpointed to the partners as necessary internal documents to share key findings and support that the produced key results are in line with the project roadmap and objectives. Furthermore, a set of dissemination and communication activities are planned to promote the project results in the educational community.