ABOUT THE PROJECT – SQUARES – Sustainability and Quality Assurance for Academic Governance and Redesign Engineering Studies

Title: Sustainability and Quality Assurance for Academic Governance and Redesign Engineering Studies SQUARES
Project number 101129192 — SQUARES
Call ERASMUS-EDU-2023-CBHE-STRAND-2
Start date: 2023-10-01
End date: 2026-09-30
Budget 799 932,00 EUR

The main objective of the SQUARES project is to bridge the educational skill gap between HEI, industry, and the professional employment market in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan in the fields of engineering education and quality management in universities in two main areas:
1. Introduction of transversal skills that are actually missing in the fields of energy engineering, civil engineering and industrial engineering.
2. Improvement of the quality management system in targeted HEIs, both in terms of the course of study development and institutional management.
The main direct target groups of the project are students, teachers and trainers, as well as administrative staff and HEI management. The project would also indirectly benefit the larger society with the improved employment potential of graduates empowered with modern skills introduced by the project. 140 students will be directly trained at partner universities, and 350 more trained with a help of Distance Experimental Lab (DEL), which is an innovative didactic system to participate in experiments with equipment and appliances they might not have at parent university.
The DEL will host a Didactic Learning Platform (DLP) which is a system that facilitates distance learning activities at and in hybrid mode.
To achieve these goals, 70 teachers will be trained to make optimal use of the new teaching resources. These numbers would grow as more students joined the studies in subsequent years and innovations in quality management system become well established in everyday practice.
The main objective related outputs include mostly reports that facilitate iterative creation of a knowledge base to be transferred to partner universities and its practical delivery to partner universities. Each training activity will be monitored and evaluated in terms of quality and impact on the target group.
There will also be reports on the implementation of QMS in selected universities followed by a sample internal audit.