Financial Agreement number

Commercialisation: if the product has been or will be commercialised, please describe the marketing and pricing strategy, and actions taken / foreseen.

All the products of the project will be available freely. If we decide to print an important number of copies of any of the reports, we might consider selling them, probably through the EAEEIE association (www.eaeeie.org).
Transversal issues

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  Where applicable, please specify how the project will contribute to:
  

(Please tick the appropriate boxes)
 Equality between women and men (attraction of women in scientific studies)

 Integration of disabled people (adaptation of pedagogical resources for disabled people)

 Fight against racism and xenophobia

 Promotion of economic and social cohesion

 ICT in education – the eLearning Action Plan

 Language teaching and learning

 Preparing the enlargement of the Union

 Sustainable development

 Stability and security

 The future challenges to education and training systems

 Lifelong learning
Evaluation

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  What tools and criteria have been / will be used to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of your work (process and results)? Who did the evaluation / will be doing the evaluation. What is the evaluation process/methodology?
  

Inner monitoring: an inner monitoring board has been defined, in order to make constructive critics on the advancement of the project. This inner monitoring group interacts with the general coordinator, the strategic board and the task coordinators (that is, the Managing Board).

This inner monitoring is composed of four persons (called monitors). These monitors are volunteers, coming from four different countries and four different sub-specialities of Electrical and Information Engineering. The result of the monitoring group consists in a report about the project giving some feedback and pieces of advice on the various project’s objectives and achievements.

The management, the tasks evolution, the coherence between provisional and real plannings, will be taken into account as well as the fact that the functioning of the project has been improved taking account of the remarks given previously by the monitoring board.

The results of the monitoring are enclosed in an appendix of the progress report.

External monitoring: Associations such as SEFI, IEEE education, BEST (student association) could participate in an external monitoring. BEST is a member of the project, as well as the French and German "education" chapters of IEEE.

To be more concrete, we have invited four persons to act as external monitor of the project.

J. Gonzales (Tuning project), who will be represented by Hendrik FERDINANDE,

V. De KosinskY, Virginia CANO, Eduardo CORREIO (CENELEC), Jorge ESTEVES (Entidade Reguladora do Sector Eléctrico" (ERSE)).

All these persons have accepted to perform an external monitoring of the project.

Other institutions will be contacted, mainly at the end of the project, such as ESN (Erasmus Student Network), FIEE…

Hendrick Ferdinande participated in the meeting in Craiova (June 2006) mainly as an adviser for the TUNING methodology, and Victor de Kosinski acted as an external evaluator at the middle of the project. His report is presented in appendices.
Feedback on the project

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  Please describe any divergence from the initial project plan (aims and objectives, work programme, products, partnership, and budget). Give the reasons for the changes.
  

Compared to the full application, some aspects notably dealing with "jobs in our disciplines" or "study of excellence regions in EIE" have been phased out, because at first these aspects were not retained in the final contract but especially because we should focus first on some actions which corresponds to the four activities described in the report. These actions are also the actions which are of greater interest to most of the partners.

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  Please provide an overview of any difficulties encountered during the reporting period.
  

One of the main points is to motivate partners, taking into account the fact that there is not a lot of money to motivate them, and especially taking into account the fact that main partners are very dynamic colleagues, involved in several activities, and their participation in the project is one activity among others.

Another difficult point is the co-financing aspect: we should provide more invoices and declarations of expenses than the grant provided by the Commission. It is really difficult for some partners to provide co-financing, and also it is extremely time-consuming both for the coordinator and the partners to manage all these aspects. It would have been better (and allowing the members of the project to spend more time on the actual purposes of the project) if we could receive a grant, justify it through the eligibility rules, and that's all…

The last difficulty concerns the management of staff costs:

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  This is difficult for some colleagues to obtain the document
  
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  This is also really time-consuming both for the coordinator and the partners
  
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  This is really a delicate and unfair point since because there is a very large spectrum of wages or salaries throughout Europe. This could bring a situation of "gêne".
  

Annexes - Codes to be used in the Report