The BENEFIT project consortium has worked hard on a contingency plan as a response to those project activities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which undeniably had and still has an impact on certain tasks of the project, especially because Austria and other countries declared travel restrictions for many of the Balkan countries. The plan we developed wants to fully guarantee the realization of all project objectives and mainly focuses on the following:
1) A project extension until Feb. 14, 2021: it is a necessary step that allows us to include another academic semester into our project lifespan. The current semester has been highly impacted by COVID-19 containment measures. For example, it has become difficult to reach out to students and engage them in project-related activities. Including another full semester gives us the necessary physical time to collect feedback about the courses modernized within BENEFIT and wrap-up other activities that involve the participation of students. Furthermore, physical meetings and teacher trainings, which are an important pillar of our KA2 Erasmus+ project, could not take place during the lockdown, so the additional time will also be used to hold these. The project extension was officially requested and legally approved by the EACEA with an Amendment to the Grant Agreement in July 2020.
2) Restructuring and replanning of low-risk travel activities: while trying our best in maintaining coherency with the initial mobility plan, plus keeping as many travels alive as possible, we restructured and readapted those travel activities that have a lower risk factor and the highest value for the project, e.g. teacher trainings. Unfortunately, a few mobilities or internships had to be completely canceled since they involve the participation of many people, such as the student summer camp at Ericsson Nikola Tesla lab in Zagreb and at CISCO in Belgrade planned for June and July 2020. Teacher trainings within WP2 have been restructured in a way that two simultaneous meetings aggregate the partners from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on a national level, in order to reduce international travel, thus risk. For all other future travel activities, we also reduced international long-distance travel where possible.
What we did in the first half of 2020:
– Professional teacher training hosted by J.J. Strossmayer University of Osijek on 12-13 February 2020 with the title “ICT Teaching Practices Training”. Click here for the agenda;
– Professional teacher training hosted virtually by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the University of Sarajevo on July 15-16, 2020, with the title “Designing a Course for Stimulating Entrepreneurship in Higher Education”;
– Student mobility from the University of Sarajevo to the University of Klagenfurt for 3 months. Two students had the opportunity to spend a full semester at the University of Klagenfurt, attend classes and be involved in project-related activities;
– Partners from Sarajevo and Tuzla completed equipment procurement and installment in their universities.
Upcoming events:
– Professional teacher training hosted by the University of Niš in September 2020
– ERK Portorož conference on September 21 and 22, 2020, with a special session dedicated to BENEFIT
– Open Event at the University of Novi Sad in October 2020.
– Project meeting at the University of Klagenfurt in October or November 2020.
CLICK here to access the deliverables and reports
- YouTube Channel
- E- platform for training, internships and e-learning
- Main Benefit project website
- Erasmus+
- BENEFIT facebook page
Information: For further information please contact us by sending an e-mail to project-benefit@aau.at
