The main goal with the project is through collaboration within the three HEI's to give companies, HEI's and students a European mindset in times of growing nationalism. This was gained by cross-national activities that lead to knowledge sharing and network building. The activities completed in this project has added value to all stakeholders. The 3 HEI's, VIA University College, Stichting Fontys and Hochschule Offenburg were the main parties because these schools were part of founding the concept Midplus Knowledge Cluster. Since 2016 Midplus has gained experience through activities leading us to conclude that knowledge sharing needs to be enhanced as to gain a mindset that will mean more employable students, companies participation in our curricular at the HEI's and finally teachers getting a broader knowledge base. In this project we also included alumni in order to create a stronger bond with companies and thus increasing places for internships and thesis work. The project have attached associated partners, HZ Vlissingen, Holland and HAMK Finland. The idea on a longer term is to expand Midplus to other HEI's across Europe using our network and the developed IT platform. The activities were split two ways: 1) we have created a Midplus Communication and Collaboration platform to: - secure a European network of companies and their core competences and knowledge - secure a European database of the competencies at the HEI's - secure a European Alumni network 2) we have involved students, teachers and companies in project activities as to clarify: - the different teaching cultures - evaluation of the ECTS point system in cross-national projects - and enhance a cross-national teachers network - the involvement of companies - how Midplus activities can meet the requirements of companies as to have them involved This workload of these activities were split equally between the 3 HEI’s and all activities had students and teachers participating from each HEI. We did not succeed in evaluation of the ECTS system due to very different ways of handling courses in curricula, but we did gain insight into how to incorporate projects into local HEI´s curricula.Through articles, presentations and networking the HEI's has disseminate knowledge to the local area thus making the HEI’s more attractive to coming students, companies and teachers. On a national level the Midplus project will support the European mindset among the students, companies, teachers and other internal/external stakeholders in times of growing nationalism in European countries. On a European level Midplus invites other countries and their HEI’s universities to become part of the network. This will gain a European-wide network of logisticians with all the different cultures in Europe involved. The current partners are interested in broadening the network after a period of consolidation and following this project. The EU funding has helped to establish tools necessary to cope with a growing number of partners with different backgrounds within the network.The project has involved teachers, students and companies. In Top-weeks typically 5 students from each HEI as well as 2-3 teachers were involved and with a duration of 5 days. Due to Covid-19 many Top-weeks and company activities could not be performed in the way they were intented. Online activities were developed and executed with good results, but it was not possible to have the amount of Top-weeks and company projects as planned. Companies refused to participate since they wanted to focus on their core business and students expressed that they didn’t want to participate in more online activities. The Midplus Communication and Collaboration platform has involved IT students and teachers for its development. The Midplus project has been innovative as it has addressed the logistics mindset in a networking and transnational collaboration context. Even though there have been many transnational projects, the discipline of Logistics and the exchange of knowledge between HEI's and companies has been new. Through this project knowledge is created from HEI’s delivering talents to the companies and back to HEI’s through alumni students. This serves employer branding, connects companies to young and experienced talents and addresses and supports the problem of a shortage of skilled labour force. The IT platform support this.

Through the Erasmus+ project Marginalisation and Co-Created Education (MaCE) Higher Education students from a range of positions were able to become part of the academic research community, being co-researchers and contributing with their expertise. MaCE is a joint cooperation between University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), University of Cumbria (UoC), United Kingdom and VIA University College (VIA), Denmark, drawing on the institution’s competence and experience. This is an innovative approach to generate synergy between education, research, innovation and social inclusion in order to include students who may have experienced marginalisation to develop research on dropouts as well as gaining accreditation through bachelor (BA) and master (MA) pathways.MaCE built on four corner stones, 1) Co-constructed and socio cultural perspective, 2) the importance of context, 3) The indirect approach and 4) Equality Literacy. The first two points are visible through students being co-researchers. The project generated opportunities for them to work alongside the university researchers as part of the research community, learning skills and developing their self-efficacy encouraging them to continue their educational pathways as well as enhancing their employability. The context for both the higher education students and the students at school were visible when drawing upon students as a resource within research and the educational setting. The project built on young people and student’s’ experiences in developing the educational programs. Students from both masters and bachelors programs were trained in methodology and have worked side by side with experienced researchers in researching on younger ESL/NEET students. In this way, the students have drawn upon their own lived experiences (context) as well as learning practically and theoretically. The students were actively involved as interviewers, respondents, analysts and writers. They joined as individuals and became active participants in the social practices of a social, multidisciplinary and multinational community. In this way the students actively constructed their academic identity through this environment, and obtained academic merits, which has helped them stand firmly and secure in the meeting with the academic environment. The third corner stone “The indirect approach” (Moshuus & Eide, 2016) is a unique methodological approach utilised by the project to grasp the experiences put forth by disadvantaged young people, both in HEI and school. Through this approach and the data gathered by the co-researchers and researchers, we developed two models (the fourth point) Equality Literary (EQL) and Wellbeing, Education, Learning and Development Model (WELD). These models enabled a bio-social-cultural, life course, systemic view of educational privilege and disadvantage. Such an understanding informed an alternative approach to education in its broadest sense.We found that many of the students entered the research community with an expertise from a range of life positions, disadvantaged and advantaged. These students brought new and valuable knowledge and competence into the community, giving them a sense of belonging in the academic milieu. The students also reported how the barriers between faculty and students disappeared when working together with researchers, how much more they had learned, that they felt comfortable in the role and that taking the next step in their academic studies seemed more likely. All in all 51 students participated and 13 researchers from the three countries. Most of the students have completed their course. Many of the students have been interested in going from BA to MA, and some from MA to PhD. At the moment one of the students have achieved a PhD scholarship, while others apply for positions related to research. Other students find that their publications help them in their search for jobs, while others have been able to build network through MaCE that have been valuable in their continuing career. One student has even established a new school in the UK underpinned by the learning from the project. For the Universities the models developed have been shared and distributed through their networks both regionally, nationally and internationally. MaCE is also spread within the institutions including students as co-researchers, especially on MA level. The MaCE journal will be continued as a way of publishing student’s research, the online course in training the students as researchers as well as the handbook for following up will be further developed in each institutions. Several other institutions nationally and internationally, both HEI and practitioners have taken MaCE further. The results and the experience of MaCE led to new funding through Erasmus+ KAIII project Co-creating through Social Inclusion (COSI.ed) with 11 partners in 5 countries in order to upgrade MaCE to policy level. this means MaCE has a future impact on Europe.

This project will innovate Nordic traditions of education to strengthen recruitment for teacher training programmes and at the same time improve the legitimacy of this profession. The background is a decrease in number of applicants for teacher training programmes and a weakening of the foundation of applicants measured by e.g. grade point average in upper secondary school. Even if there are differences between countries and between educational programmes, becoming a teacher is generally not a popular choice among young people. There may be several reasons to this rejection of teachers training programmes. In this project we will focus on what will be described as loss of meaning and shaping of meaning. Young people choosing this career path have traditionally done so to help other people, i.e. as an act of altruism. This has been and still is a leitmotif in the education programme. However, learning targets, tests, evaluations, and external interests seem to increasingly impede on this leitmotif. The risk is loss of meaning and a growing rejection of the teacher training programmes. Thus, the project will attempt to strengthen recruitment for teacher training programmes by innovating and reintroducing Nordic forms of education which are assumed to increase sensemaking among student teachers. Keywords are democratic bildung, involvement of student teachers, and creation of teaching methods which respect and at the same time qualify the leitmotif of wanting to do something (good) for someone else. More precisely, the project will develop and implement four actions to increase sensemaking – one of each partner. At University of Southern Denmark, the action will focus on collective learning groups which is an already tested method to involve and qualify the preunderstandings of student teachers. At VIA University College, the action will focus on developing students’ attitudes with respect to two core values in the education programme: (1) social responsibility and participation in the knowledge society; (2) integration of students’ life history in the development of a professional identity. At Högskolan Väst, the action will concern an ongoing attempt to shape work-related learning. This is a special programme where student teachers alternate frequently between work and school in order to better integrate theory and praxis. At University of Agder, the action will develop and further qualify an attempt to stimulate collaboration (co-creation) between teachers in the education programme, teachers at practice schools, and student teachers. The aim is to increase sensemaking among student teachers at campus as well as in training periods.The project will include 16 participants from 4 partners: 4 from each partner. From Denmark, the partners are: University of Southern Denmark and VIA University College; from Sweden, the partner is: Högskolan Väst; from Norway, the partner is: University of Agder. The partners are institutions which offer teacher training programmes and do research in this respect. In addition to the mentioned participants, the project will include students, other teachers/researchers, and leaders at the involved institutions. The project is expected to produce results such as Nordic forms of education emphasising democratic bildung, involvement, and sensemaking, scientific and popular publications, among others a textbook for the Nordic teacher training programmes, tutorials and marketing materials aimed at increasing the number of student teacher applicants. The project is expected to impact students’ and teachers’ meaning formation and level of satisfaction, number of applicants and composition of applicants in the Nordic teacher training programmes. Furthermore, at the EU/international level we hope to contribute to more widespread use and greater recognition of the Nordic school tradition.

Informed by the European strategy for a Better Internet for Kids (BIK, 2012) the project (’CyGen’) engaged directly with children (aged 8-13), teachers & parents in four European countries (the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark & Greece) in order to: 1.Explore the digital opportunities and challenges for children; 2.Develop a novel participatory design methodology and methods in order to work collaboratively with children, & teachers & parents; 3.Co-design a culturally, linguistically and age appropriate open-access multimedia education programme with children in each of the participating countries;4.Produce online open-access guidance encompassing lesson plans and pedagogical resources to support teachers and educators in primary and secondary schools in diverse European education settings to support children’s online safety The project engaged directly with 276 children, 54 teachers & 46 parents as co-producers of the digital education programme & as participants at the ME events in each of the four participating countries. Children, teachers & parents were recruited from each of the four partner schools. Local education authorities, police & law enforcement agencies & academics in each country participated in our ME events & dissemination activities. Total stakeholder engagement to date directly through the co-designed project activities, ME events & face-to-face dissemination & indirectly through digital engagement (website visits, twitter) is 955,144. The primary contribution and impacts of the project are:-The development of a new participatory design methodology and tools for supporting children as co-designers of digital education in a field that is dominated by adult-led content;-The co-design, test and implementation of digital education resources that directly benefited the participating children, teachers and parents;-The transferability of the project; whereby making available the pedagogical resources, participatory design methodology and tools on the project website in order to benefit children, teachers and parents across the EU and beyond.The outputs created for this project can be found on the project website http://cygen.eu/ and are freely available to download.

<< Objectives >>Virtual Production Studio Networks seeks to build networks between creatives and technicians to prepare both for the emergent role of Virtual Production among media industries and their attendant educational structures. The project aims to conduct extensive research that qualifies a series of workshops - which in turn generate understanding about the impact of, establish frameworks for learning about, and create educational goals and materials for working with Virtual Production technologies.<< Implementation >>VPSN is centered on cooperation and collaboration within the partner group and with many target audiences, including international media and technology companies. The team will implement market/industry research, conduct analysis and push publication thereof, engage hands on workshops for students and educators, and create a well-defined teaching framework including training materials to develop a skills sharing platform with strong emphasis on training and networking activities in the EU.<< Results >>The results will be to create an understanding of the impact of Virtual Production on a number of fields and industries and prepare HEI’s and students for this shift. The project will also create a network of relevant skills that can cooperate on virtual productions which are effective at distance, and in doing so will address EU priorities of digital readiness, resilience and capacity, digital and green capability, and improving competencies of educators in a wide variety of fields.