Activities 

This first work package is about the management process of the project. USJ as coordinator will be responsible for the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling and the project’s closing phase. At every stage of the process, the USJ coordinator will be responsible of defining the project goals, creating the project plans, defining roles and responsibilities among all EU and Lebanese partners. The team will be organizing the meetings between all EU and Lebanese partners. The teams will also be managing and controlling the budget to ensure good quality of project implementation within the budget that is already submitted with this proposal.

USJ will be responsible of the:

• Coordination and network management
• Coordinating meetings among partners
• Financial management
• Performing administrative management across partners.
• Reporting and monitoring
• Consulting with EU partners and experts to well manage the project

The SE.TC team will work on updating the preliminary results that were conducted before the submission of the proposal to assess the needs of social entrepreneurship in building capacity in Higher Education Institutions. The team will work on identifying the problem and needs, determining the design of needs assessment, collecting and analyzing data, and finally on updating the original results and and recommendations. Based on the results, training workshops will be formulated. 

In this framework guidelines and manuals will be written after the identification of training needs for instructors, and a curriculum will be prepared and offered for Lebanese students at the Lebanese partners institutions.

After the main preparations to start with the project, this phase would be to train the trainers. EU partners will take part in introducing the new concept of social entrepreneurship (innovation and creativity) to the Lebanese instructors who will prepare the curriculum for the students, following their attendance to the seminars and workshops. In addition, the EU partners will help the Lebanese Universities in preparing the platform that will gather all the database/outcome of this project. Other workshops will be organized at the Lebanese universities to spread awareness and to introduce the concept of social entrepreneurship and business ethics to the Lebanese students.

Afterwards, 80 students from USJ, 80 students from Lebanese University, 80 students from Al Azm University and 80 students from La Sagesse University will be identified to get enrolled in this program. The 4 Lebanese universities will be responsible for delivering the social entrepreneurship and business ethics courses among the 4 campuses. Students will be trained on organizing, controlling and building a whole business plan for any creative business idea they would like to start working with. Our instructors will offer them the opportunity to network with NGOs and to be the trainers who will identify other business needs, each at his own community. Our instructors will accompany our students in their communities as well, to evaluate their potential on how they are able to help other members in their communities; how they are able to deliver the knowledge they have learned to other potential business owners or start-up businesses.

European Partners will provide its methodological and technical know-how on distance teaching and learning and will train the professors of Lebanese partners on the production of video lessons and other digitized educational resources.

The topics of the remote training will be:

• digitisation of training materials and educational resources
• production of visual aids to support the video lessons.
• technical and methodological aspects of the production of video lessons; recording studio and tools.

This WP concerns Quality control within the project. The following tasks will be undertaken:

• Internal control of project progress and outcomes.
• Monitoring and evaluation of deliverables.
• Monitoring and evaluation of the events.
• Suggestions of improvement strategies, including evaluation of new courses, improved teaching and center facilities as well as teaching staff and student training.
• Monitoring the achievement of objectives such as impact of the project at each university, improvements in skills, response to social needs, impact of the project at regional/national level, enrolment of students in new and updated courses, etc.
• Monitoring students’ ability to enter the job market through social entrepreneurial initiatives as start-ups.

In this Work package, UNIMED will be responsible for designing and developing the project visual identity, dissemination channels, proportional materials, etc. The overall aim is to grant the project the maximum possible visibility and engage target groups and stakeholders. It also includes developing awareness workshops directed to educators and students. Social entrepreneurship events in HEIs will be promoted in this work package. The dissemination strategy will provide thorough information on the project outcomes and approach.

Dissemination will be carried out following 3 main strategies:

• Paper strategy: design and distribution of flyer/branded materials, press release, etc
• Multimedia strategy: set-up and update the project website, curating a web presence, publishing news and posts, social media coverage, etc
• Event strategy: presentations in key thematic conferences onsite and online, organization of workshops, seminars and the closing SE.TC conference.