Critical skills, such as teamwork, project collaboration, and concept presentation, remain underdeveloped without structured university learning environments. These skills are essential for success in real-world projects and require a dedicated academic focus. The flipped classroom teaching method offers a solution by presenting students with specific challenges and asking them to solve the problem. We implemented a customized flipped teaching method to teach data structures and algorithms in the Immersive Software Engineering program at the University of Limerick, fostering active learning and practical application of concepts. The results show that students can learn more effectively and in a shorter time compared to traditional methods.

This research investigates the use of diverse visual knowledge communication tools in the multidisciplinary training produced in the BC4ECO project. During this project, teaching and learning content was developed to enable postgraduate learners to utilise blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to solve complex, real-world problems related to environmental sustainability. We examine how visual modelling techniques enhance comprehension across disciplines and facilitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, particularly for learners who may not have prior programming or computer science knowledge. Findings suggest that using these tools leads to enhanced collaboration between computer scientists and non-computer scientists and aids in the facilitation of joint problem solving between seemingly disparate disciplines. Additionally, the study highlights how the use of tools for established software engineering modelling, like Visual Paradigm for UML, bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementation, strengthening problem solving skills and improving software development education.

Collaboration between schools at a cross-national level requires a secure and trustable system that respects the rules, and policies of the parties, specifically the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) needs to be placed in the system. The GDPR, or similar laws and the curricula differ in respective. Students who want to take any course at another school abroad cannot easily sign in and access the study content, even if that school wishes to share it. Still, this is what society, industry, and education ministries in different countries wish. The schoolgirls in Afghanistan who wish to study online in the girl’s school of Ireland are specifically considered as a case study in this paper. We use a case study research method in which the existing online learning tools are analysed that are used in Irshad High School in Afghanistan and Coláiste Nano Nagle School in Limerick, Ireland. We furthermore prototype the architecture of a system that provides a secure collaboration platform. Thus, this collaboration platform we develop can be adopted at various levels of education for any country with the goal to achieve a long-term effect on the flexibility of the respective education systems to yield a globalization of education. We use the internet, mobile and educational platforms, and a secure broker (interface) that provides the tools for the schools’ collaboration, including the sharing of resources, an exchange of experience and enabling access to education worldwide.

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are dedicated networks that provide a backbone for the collaboration and data exchange between academic organizations. However, the lack of a domain-specific bridging application, lack of interoperability and data integration are serious challenges in educational technologies, hampering collaboration and resource sharing even within existing agreements. NRENs are cost-effective backbones of large scale networks aimed to deliver convergence and promote educational opportunities beyond individual institutions. In this paper we prototype an inter-organization bridging application based on an abstract NREN architecture based on a broker pattern. The ability to communicate is also an essential precondition for the easy adoption of Open Education Resources. The motivating case study is the Afghanistan Research and Educational Network (AfgREN). To enhance ease of adoption, adaptation, and evolution, the prototype is designed following an eXtreme Model-Driven Development (XMDD) paradigm, using a low-code development environment for modelling data, processes, user interfaces in an agile rapid prototyping fashion. We generalize the results to the (federated) collaboration of regional and global NRENs, to enable the delivery of easy collaboration, data integration, high accessibility, and resource sharing across educational organizations on a national and cross-national level.

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are developed to provide access and collaboration between educational organizations. Single-Sign-On (SSO) applications such as eduGAIN are used in the pan European research and education network (GÉANT) and Shibboleth is used in the Internet2 NRENs in the United States. However, the lack of data integration between many eLearning systems is still a challenge in the NREN domain. We address systematic data integration between large-scale eLearning systems by designing and prototyping an eLearning broker. The NREN eLearning architecture considers the strategies and policies of collaboration parties. We apply the eXtreme Model-Driven Development (XMDD) paradigm, using the DIME low-code development environment for data modeling, process modeling, interface modeling and prototyping. The motivating case study is the Afghanistan Research and Educational Network (AfgREN).