Mismatch between the skills of graduates and those demanded by employers is widely regarded as a source of disappointing graduate outcomes such as unemployment and underemployment. With rising participation rates, inequality of graduate outcomes has widened. Compounded by economic shocks, the issue of graduate employment outcomes has become a policy priority. However, the situation is likely to worsen as a result of the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Despite being less susceptible to the disease itself, young people are likely to be negatively affected by the economic impact given their precarious employment situation as the “first-out and last-in” group of the labour market – a dynamic that becomes even more pronounced during economic downturns as revealed following the 2008 financial crisis. A wide range of information sources has emerged to inform the skills needs of local labour markets. Moreover, the European Education Area encourages collaboration on data collection in a harmonised and comparable way. However, practitioners in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that are tasked with developing courses and programmes are not experts in labour market intelligence and are unlikely to utilise it to support the development of graduate employability attributes through their teaching. Moreover, even when they do it is unclear whether available labour market intelligence is suitable to inform course and programme development in higher education.The objective of the Employability in Programme Development (EPD) project is to establish a feedback loop from the labour market to HEIs in order inform programme and course design to best support the employability of future graduates.The project consortium is made up of five participating organisations. Four of these are HEIs, which provide complementary academic and administrative expertise drawn from four distinct higher education systems: England, Scotland, Spain and Belgium. We also collaborate with the Catalan Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency (AQU), which brings to the consortium expertise in graduate outcome surveys and access to institutional networks across Europe.Informed by the needs of stakeholders, the project consortium will map the availability of information on skills demand in the context of each participating institution as well as the needs of practitioners in participating HEIs for labour market intelligence to inform their course and programme design. This in turn will be used to design and develop a prototype labour market intelligence dashboard for use by staff in HEIs. To augment secondary data sources made accessible through the dashboard, a dedicated survey of graduates, specially designed to inform the needs of designing teaching programmes for employability, will be developed and piloted. We will also use the data from the survey pilots to write and publish an innovative report on the employability attributes that are important for the employment outcomes of recent graduates. We invite employability officers from European HEIs to a residential workshop exploring best practice for supporting academic and administrative staff to improve the employability features of their teaching programmes. A summary of best practice findings from the workshop will be published in a publicly available report.The project will apply a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods, user engagement and Delphi methods to identify the needs of HE practitioners, analyse existing data sources and create additional data. Building on these approaches, design methods will be deployed to develop an innovative employability dashboard that will make relevant intelligence available to Higher Education (HE) practitioners.Our target audience are academics, administrators, leaders and employability officers in European HEIs. We envisage changing the practice of programme and course development in participating HEIs so that staff will take full advantage of relevant labour market intelligence curated via our feedback loop dashboard to embed employability issues in routine programme and course design. Findings and outputs will be publicly available through a project website and will be further disseminated through outreach events. Thereby we envisage reaching a wider audience than the HEIs directly participating. By establishing a feedback loop from the labour market to HEIs we envisage a long-run impact where the HE sector becomes more engaged with its labour market context. More engaged HEIs will in turn be better able to cultivate relevant skills in their students and thereby support better labour market outcomes of graduates.

Higher education (HE) is considered to be a decisive asset for finding employment and having successful careers. Following this logic, in its renewed EU agenda for higher education (COM/2017/247 final), the Commission highlighted the importance of increasing the number of HE graduates to 40% and placing HE at the centre of innovation, job creation, competitiveness and sustainability (Europe 2020 Strategy). There are, however, increasing concerns that HE is not providing graduates with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in a rapidly evolving educational and employment environment, and there remain continued skills mismatches in some Member States. Knowing the requirements of the labour market is essential to match the supply and demand of skills so to improve the competitiveness of graduates. Indeed, providing students with the right skills for employment has been identified as one of four priorities of the flagship initiative ‘An agenda for new skills and jobs’ (COM/2010/682 final). In recent years, the growing importance of soft-skills in fostering student academic achievement and long-term success has been recognised by actors involved in education and in the labour market all across Europe. Soft skills are cross-cutting across jobs and sectors and relate to personal competences and social competences. Its development is intended to enable and enhance personal development, participation in learning as well as improve career prospects. Higher education institutions (HEI) in Europe should react fast and shape its educational programs in order to ensure that its graduate students enter the work equipped with the sort of skills required by employers. HEIs can indeed play an important role in identifying needs at the local level and facilitating the transition from education to employment. Their direct involvement in the local socio-economic fabric would allow to enhance the employment environment and positively contribute to the overall labour market performance. For universities to have a real impact on labour market outcomes, it is essential that their educational offer matches the skills gaps at local and regional level. Equally, it is increasingly important to make the existing curricula more competitive and tuned to the forthcoming changes. One of the keys to making HEIs more responsive to skill demands is to help them effectively assess the extent to which their programs offer an appropriate curricula for acquiring and developing the skills that are relevant to the labour market. Thus, the project seeks to support universities in their efforts to improve the quality of education by adapting curricula to the soft-skill demands of the labour market and, as a result, ensure a greater impact on the employment situation of future graduates. The project aims at strengthening HEIs capacity to assess whether and to what extent their programs match the soft-skills that are particularly valued in the labour market. Skills4Employability will be structure as follows: IO1: Guidelines for Integrating soft-skills in HEIs' curricula -IO1.A1: Methodology for IO1.-IO1.A2: Collection of sources of literature and practices related to soft-skills in Universities. (academic articles, European projects, Initiatives etc.)-IO1.A3: National reports on the labour market soft-skill requirements.-IO1.A4: Establishing the guide including findings partner countries.IO2: Assessment of Soft-Skills in HEIs curricula. - IO2.A1: Research on soft-skill assessment methods in Higher Education- IO2.A2: Compilation of good practices in soft-skill assessment- IO2.A3: Alignment between the soft-skill integration guidelines and the assessment- IO2.A4: Development of the soft-skill assessment guidelines, The O1 will carry out a preliminary research about the definition, relevance and gaps regarding soft-skills in the context of higher education and employment. The research will help to define what the most relevant soft-skills are, the objective being to establish a common set of soft-skills that will later serve as a basis for the development of the assessment procedure in IO2. First partners will focus on the higher education context and then move focus to the labour market. This twofold analysis is essential for bridging the gap between the skills required in the workplace and universities skills provision, that is to say, to reduce the skill mismatch. The main objective of IO2 is to explore the best way of measuring the soft-skill content of universities curricula and identify those criteria and indicators that better capture the soft-skill dimension within HEIs to finally come up with a comprehensive assessment that weights the soft-skills validated in IO1 against the criteria and indicators established at this stage. The soft skill assessment will allow universities to learn how they include these skills in their curricula and boost the adaptation of their programmes in accordance with the project's result.

<< Objectives >>The objective is to provide practitioners and students with a set of practices, approaches, and tools to address the assessment needs of STEM education in remote, considering gender issues. The goals are to:- Detect the appropriate approaches and practices for assessment of STEM students in remote, considering gender equity.- Develop benchmarks and guidelines, according to the EQAAs (External Quality Assurance Agency) requirements, to implement and successfully evaluated the learning process<< Implementation >>The main activities will be:- Mapping and clustering of main established remote assessment systems in STEM in Europe.- Gap Analysis to provide an in-depth and grounded understanding of the current needs in the assessment systems and evaluation of remote learning in STEM, considering gender issues. - Definition of benchmark and guidelines to implement and evaluate remote learning assessment. - Design the roadmap and recommendations for improving learning experience in remote learning.<< Results >>The main results of the project will be: - A thorough and comprehensive review of current assessment and remote learning practices in STEM.- A benchmark to provide an understanding of normative actions that need to be implemented to properly assess and evaluate.- User-friendly guidelines, supported by agencies, to improve the students’ learning experience, considering gender issues.- A roadmap and sustainability plan to implement the normative actions, methods, and recommendations.

Internal Quality Management System in Higher Education is criticised as being too-process oriented, box-ticking and insufficiently focused on consequential and generalisable outcomes because of the high quantity of indicators involved, which complicates the indicators’ accurate and timely analysis, and consequently their adequate use for decision-making at different levels (strategic, tactical or operational). In 2015, the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) were revised (first version in 2005) and approved. Although not being mandatory or prescriptive, the set of standards and guidelines in Part 1 of the ESG contribute to ensure that the Internal Quality Management Systems (QMS) of HEIs in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) adhere to the same set of principles and that the processes and procedures implemented are modelled to fit the purposes and requirements of their contexts. In 2018, the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) published in 2018 a new standard entitled “Educational Organisation Management Systems”, providing criteria for the alignment of the HEIs’ internal QM systems to the world-known ISO 9001 standard.In this context, the SMART-QUAL project addresses some existing important needs: · Lack of a comprehensive framework of harmonised quality indicators and benchmarks.· Lack of internal QM systems’ evaluation process by quality assurance agencies, based on common criteria and indicators, which translates in efforts of HEIs to implement internal QM systems not being officially recognised.- The main objective of the SMART-QUAL is to support HEIs in the implementation of effective internal QM system by designing a set of quality indicators to be implemented and improve in the short and long term the internal QM systems (make them more efficient and effective) and the alignment of these indicators in a structured catalogue according to the three main levels of decision making (strategic, tactical and operational).- The consortium: a balanced international partnership formed by UMinho University (Portugal) Conexx-Europe (Belgium), Aveiro University (Portugal), A3ES Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (Portugal), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Spain), AQU The Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (Spain), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and Studiju Kokybes Vertinimo Centras (Lithuania), will work together to impact all over Europe and ensure the project’s long term sustainability and broad dissemination.- The target groups the projects aims to impact includes management boards, administrative staff, professors, researchers of HEIs and quality agencies. Furthermore, the project targets other stakeholders involved in the quality management systems and final beneficiary groups as the students benefiting from a more efficient QM system that will impact their education and as the societies, this HEIs interact with.- SMART-QUAL will apply stakeholder surveys, desk research and comparative analysis incompetence and training analysis, and participatory product development and observation in the development of the results and provided online tools.- The structure of the main outcomes of the project will be:IO1: Creation of a new and replicable Quality Indicators Scoreboard (QIS) and a Smart-Qual Wikicontaining all the findings of the IO1.IO1-A1: State-of-the-art of the quality management system of higher education institutions.IO1-A2: Literature review on quality indicators and quality management systemsIO1-A3 Harmonisation of the indicators and creation of the Quality Indicators ScoreboardIO1-A4 Creation of the SMART-QUAL WikiIO2: Guidelines to support the QIS practical implementation in the HEIsIO2-A1 Contacting relevant stakeholdersIO2-A2 Designing the structure of the guidelinesIO2-A3 Content productionIO2-A4 Testing of the new system and peer reviewIO2-A5 Graphic design of the guide- One LTTA is foreseen to be implemented in order to support universities in the practical implementation of the new QIS. During this event, members of the project and staff members working in the field of Quality in HEIs or researching this topic will acquire more knowledge on the project's subject and will work together on the development of the structure and content of the Guide on the practical implementation of the QIS.- 1 Multiplier Events will take place with the aim of gathering the local, national and European and international stakeholders and disseminate the project's results at different levels, widen its impact by fostering the implementation of the new IQS and the use of the SMART-QUAL wiki, as well as building strong networks to further develop the project’s improvements in the Quality Assurance systems and exploit SMART-QUAL’s results.

Although online education is a paramount pillar of formal, non-formal and informal learning, institutions may still be reluctant to wager for a fully online educational model. As such, there is still a reliance on face-to-face assessment, since online alternatives do not have the deserved expected social recognition and reliability. Thus, the creation of an e-assessment system that will be able to provide effective proof of student identity, authorship within the integration of selected technologies in current learning activities in a scalable and cost efficient manner would be very advantageous. The TeSLA project provides to educational institutions, an adaptive trust e-assessment system for assuring e-assessment processes in online and blended environments. It will support both continuous and final assessment to improve the trust level across students, teachers and institutions. The system will be developed taking into account quality assurance agencies in education, privacy and ethical issues and educational and technological requirements throughout Europe. It will follow the interoperability standards for integration into different learning environment systems providing a scalable and adaptive solution. The TeSLA system will be developed to reduce the current restrictions of time and physical space in teaching and learning, which opens up new opportunities for learners with physical or mental disabilities as well as respecting social and cultural differences. Given the innovative action of the project, the current gap in e-assessment and the growing number of institutions interested in offering online education, the project will conduct large scale pilots to evaluate and assure the reliability of the TeSLA system. By the nature of the product, dissemination will be performed across schools, higher education institutions and vocational training centres. A free version will be distributed, although a commercial-premium version will be launched on the market.