Courses and Pathways in Technology, Design and Engineering

Africa has a unique potential to exploit low cost renewable energy to produce green hydrogen for domestic and external markets. Green Hydrogen could become indeed the booster of a sustainable development of the continent, enabling African countries to reduce their environmental impact as well as to make them less dependent to fossil fuels which can create geopolitical issues too. African green hydrogen development could be helpful for European hydrogen transition, that’s why it’s important that both EU and AU hydrogen policies and development roadmaps are conceived in a cross-fertilizing way.

JUST GREEN AFRH2ICA project promotes collaboration within the two continents also encouraging training and joint capacity building activities. This E-Learning programme is one of the first examples of this.


The EU legal framework for Sustainable finance is continuously evolving at a fast pace. This second edition of the EUSFIL MOOC “Sustainability in the EU Company and Financial Law” presents updated videos, material and activities to help social sciences’ master students and postgraduates’ students as well as all interested persons to navigate such new evolving and fundamental framework.

The course, developed by the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on EU Sustainable Finance and Law (EUSFIL), aims to provide participants with all basic notions and instruments to understand and discuss current development and trends in the integration of sustainability in the EU company and financial law, while providing several opportunities to dive deeper. As the frameworks are still evolving and include aspects from different legal and economic fields (European Law, Company Law, Banking Law, Financial Markets Regulation etc.), the course will contribute at stimulating the audience to discuss the most challenging issues concerning such a framework from different points of view. Moreover, the course will has been one of the first in the EU explicitly targeting the sustainable finance regulatory framework.


Wine is an industry with a relevant impact, related to a huge commercial value at European level. The Eurostat statistics say that production of wine in Europe is relevant and the EU is leader in this field: in 2018, the EU Member States exported €22.7 billion (bn) of wine, and imported a total of €13.4 bn. All told, the sold production of wine (including sparkling wine, port and grape must) in the EU was around 15 billion liters. The total area under vines in the EU was 3.2 million ha in 2015, representing around 45% of the world’s total area under vines and 1.8 % of the total utilized agricultural area. 

The MOOC is developed in the framework of the European Project called MERGO (Mooc in Enology aimed at Reinforcing competences applying Game-based approach and Olfactive learning for the wine tasting Grant Agreement 2020-1-IT02-KA203-080040) funded by the European Commission in the programme Erasmus+ Key Activity 2 - Higher Education field.

The Partnership involved in this project is led by University of Foggia in Italy with three Higher Education institution namely the Universidade De Tras-On-Montes e Alto Douro in Portugal, the University of Cukurova in Turkey and University of Zagreb in Croatia, two associations Organizzazione Nazionale degli Assaggiatori Vino - ONAV in Italy and Vignerons Bio De Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France and a company called Smarted in Italy.

The MOOC includes theoretical lectures based on enology topics, i.e. vineyard and the grape quality, organic wines, wine defects, sensory evaluation of wine, wine tasting techniques, valorisation of autochthons vineyards, production chain, etc. 

The project MERGO aims to bridge the MOOC learning with the procedural learning for the recognition of sensory features using Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs). The project developed an ICT innovative tool that allows the student an autonomous training with olfactory stimuli and applying a validated framework delivered with a scientific approach, applying artificial intelligence modules (adaptive artificial tutors). 

Each lesson also permits a sensory learning experience although the course is online. The learner could exploit an olfactory kit and download on its smartphone an application that allows to train the olfactory learning by experience and in a gamified way.

The expected impact is to innovate the MOOC sector by including procedural and autonomous learning using Internet of Things, Smart Objects and Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) for a concrete and multisensory approach.

Practical experiences during the course are based on the MERGO Odour Wine Game (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.smarted.mergo&hl=it&gl=US) downloadable on Android devices equipped with NFC antennas. By tagging all the olfactory kits with NFC passive antennas it is possible to train autonomously and apply the competences achieved during the online course. More information about olfactory learning please visit (https://mergoproject.eu/).