CONCEPT AND METHODOLOGY – SQUARES – Sustainability and Quality Assurance for Academic Governance and Redesign Engineering Studies

WORK PACKAGES

Work Package 1: Project Management
The main objective of WP1 is to ensure the achievement of the project results through administrative, scientific and managerial coordination as well as to provide timely and efficient organizational and financial coordination of project activities, along with their budget. Specific activities include:
– to manage the project efficiently by providing sound administrative and financial coordination based on ERASMUS + rules and guidelines,
– to ensure a sound project implementation and quality control,
– to ensure the integrated management of demonstration activities on the project level in terms of progress reporting and compliance of progress with the description of work,
– to monitor the project progress via regular internal progress reports,
– to set up and ensure sound lines of communication between all project partners, between its management bodies as well as EACEA,
– to manage the identification of risks and to set up and run a risk monitoring/ risk remediation framework on the project level,
– to prepare, moderate and follow up the meetings of the Project Consortium and the Project Management Board.

Work Package 2: Addressing divergences between educational offer and skill requirements of the professional labour market
WP2 focuses on the development of strategy to tackle:
– Skill mismatches in the targeted HEIs,
– Needs of additional competencies and capacities in the actual didactic offer of the APC,
– Needs of specific didactic needs in terms of practice-oriented education (experimental labs, stages),
– Specific needs of the labour market.
The Main aim is to address the competence gap between current educational offer and the practical needs of the civil and industrial engineering sectors, manifesting itself at the labour market.

Work Package 3: Development of courses and preparation of the teaching materials for students
WP3 focuses on the design of the courses with respect to the results of the work in WP2. Amon the main results of this WP, there are:
– complete definition of the structure of the courses and development of teaching materials for the five project domains,
– full specifications of the Distance Experimental Lab (DEL), including the type of gears needed by the APCs and the ones to be used (already owned) by the EU side.

Work Package 4: Training resources for academic and administrative staff in Quality Management for Higher Education
The main aim of this WP is to design and deliver training activities to introduce practical aspects of Quality Management (QM) in Higher Education to administrative and academic staff in targeted HEIs. Detailed issues to be included in the training programme include:
– Introduction. The QM in University Governance;
– Principles of Quality for higher education according to the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA);
– Tasks, benefits and duties within a QMS;
– The concept of processes and basic principles for their implementation;
– Responsibilities of the Quality Manager at the university.

Work Package 5: Design, development and implementation of the Quality Management System
WP5 provides the complete design of the QMS for two partner HEIs. The design of the QMS includes:
– Identification of core activities related to QMS;
– The types and number of processes identified to be developed and included in the QMS;
– Involvement of the quality managers to be responsible for QMS implementation, selected from the participants to the courses provided in the domain number 5;
– Identification of the key performance indicators for the QMS, These KPIs will be divided into administrative and educational KPIs.

Work Package 6: Implementation of training-the-trainers activities for academic staff
The objective is to train academic teachers in the four domains in which education a activities and resources have been previously designed and developed (the fifth domain regarding Quality Management has been covered in WP3). This WP deploys in practice courses designed in WP2. The sim is twofold: i) to verify the feasibility of the activities designed in terms of times, basic skills needed of the trainers, needs of levelling some basic competencies of the trainers and ii) to receive a practical feedback from the involved trainers for potential additional needs and or/details modifications.
In addition to have the trainers updated and skilled on the transversal competencies need, this WP will allow an important tune-up of the courses designed and of the material to produce for the students, according to the suggestions and the remarks given by the trainers. This will be a very important results towards the effectiveness of the education phase of the project (WP7) because the trainers have all the necessary information on the students, their behaviour, their level of skills and the way to approach and train them, allowing a best-fitting of the material designed and produced as regards the practical needs of the classroom to which this material is delivered. The MS24 to MS27 of this WP and the MS28 to MS 31 of WP7 include this tune-up phase.

Work Package 7: Practical evaluation of new didactic resources at partner universities
This WP provides the delivery of education activities towards students in a mixed face-to-face and distance-learning modes.
The objective is to test and assess the teaching resources for students developed in WP2. Within one didactic semester of the third year of the project, the trainers will deliver the educational activities for which they have been trained (in WP6). The courses designed will be delivered to the students with a tandem approach, in which in the classroom there will be concurrent presence of one EU partner and of the trainer. The presence of the EU partner will be in presence for one week and will be then in remote way for the other lessons of the course. This didactic methodology has been previously applied in an Erasmus Mundus project, in which the trainer needed some assistance on the new arguments and benefited the students with a newly-high level wind of change, giving them the feeling of belonging to a high level Institution that uses also EU Professors for education.
For the latter, a didactic online platform is established within the Distance Experimental Lab (DEL). Then student’s satisfaction will be assessed through questionnaires. The assessment will regard Students’ perception of quality, accessibility, effectiveness/efficiency of the new teaching process based on the completely renovated didactic materials and programs.