OPTIFY - Enhancing monitoring and management capacities of HEIs on optical networks and optical communication in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan

In the OPTIFY project eight universities in total, 6 from East Neighbourhood (Azerbaijan, Georgia) and 2 from Central Asia (Kazakhstan) together with 3 supervisory institutions over HEIs, one from each target country will collaborate with 3 EU and 1 Programme countries (Sweden, Spain, Italy and Turkey) toward creating new curriculum with emphasis on optical communication networks within the special conditions and needs of the Third Country partners. The collaboration is inspired by existing partnership of target countries for building new optical cable line -a new infrastructure project so called Digital Silk Way project and aims to develop relevant skills and competencies to serve for the objectives of countries to go digital. More specifically, it will significantly focus on capacity building for educators on the new curriculum in the partner countries and their capacities will be improved to support the objectives of the new innovative curriculum. The new curriculum will introduce new teaching and learning approach-challenge driven learning- which will lead the students to experience project development on actual challenges of the industry. It will further focus on creating learning modules for upskilling and retraining of industry representatives which will enable for maintaining their competence on the most recent industrial knowledge. That`s will have new bridging role between university and industry which will lead new collaborations among the incumbents. All learning materials of the modules included in the new curriculum will be offered open access to learners of industry partners and availability of the online learning modules will be disseminated among them. The results of the project will be widely disseminated by digging deeper on the topics from scientific point of view by international scientific conference.