The Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership “Cultural Heritage Protection in Climate Change online (CHePiCC online)” translates state-of-the-art research on climate change and cultural heritage protection into distance and blended learning programmes for HE learners, following EU guidelines and directives as well as firmly basing the preparedness approach for cultural heritage protection on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The main and longterm objective of this project is to bring heritage back into HE teaching and learning, to enable future generations to protect cultural heritage and thereby identity for the future and to facilitate a behavioural change concerning cultural heritage protection and climate change, especially in the future professional lives of HE learners and teachers. The necessary holistic approach to the wide topic of cultural heritage protection is ensured by the transdisciplinary composition of the partnership which holds expertise in cultural property protection, cultural landscapes, climatology and climate change, structural engineering, material handling, preparedness measures, heritage sciences, conservation-restoration and the collaboration with emergency responders. All partners bring state-of-the-art research from current high-profile research projects to the partnership and thus guarantee a research based approach to HE and with their individual expertise on distance and blended learning in HE a student centred approach in the developed outputs of the project. CHePiCC online is firmly anchored within current European incentives to mitigate climate change and to protect cultural heritage which is an integral part of our identities and which is severely threatened by climate change and climate change induced natural disasters. Following the success of the European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018, the European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage names the holistic approach to the topic as one of the four principles for success and highlights the importance of cultural heritage as a resource for the future. The project’s main output, an open-access Massive Open Online Course on cultural heritage protection in climate change promotes cultural heritage as exactly that resource and enables higher education (HE) teachers and learners to build their future on our pasts. Cultural heritage is exposed to a number of risks in the 21st century, a fact that is highlighted by the joint EU-UNESCO Initiative#7 “Heritage at risk” as well as ICOMOS, which in 2019 put a focus on engaging cultural heritage in climate action and a number of high-profile research project programmes funded by the EU. The partnership CHePiCC online consists of four universities – one from Northern Europe (NTNU), two from Central Europe (DUK, UAA) and one from the most Southern Europe (ULPGC) – and two renowned research institutes based in Italy (CNR-ISAC) and the Czech Republic (ITAM). The partners hold complementary expertise on cultural heritage protection, cultural landscapes (in particular on the types of cultural landscapes of their specific climate zones), climate change, maintenance, structural and material engineering, material handling and HE e-learning in distance and blended formats. The immediately tangible objectives of the project are a) a Massive Open Online Course on Cultural Heritage Protection in Climate Change (covering cultural landscapes, built heritage, material preservation and climate change and thus create an interconnection between the topics), b) a tested and evaluated concept for a transdisciplinary summer university on cultural landscapes in climate change and c) a tested and evaluated concept for a live exercise in cultural heritage protection which requests the close cooperation of a number of academic disciplines and emergency responders, thus reflecting immediately the multi-stakeholder based cooperation needed in cultural heritage protection and climate change. Due to the nature of the CHePiCC online outputs they reach every one with a functioning internet connection, and are available and accessible also for HE students and teachers or other interested groups who face geographical, social or economic obstacles or have physical limitations which hamper their mobility. Thus the outputs of CHePiCC online are highly inclusive and tackle skill gaps and mismatches in HE with a topic that is one of the high priorities in the 21st century. All developed HE teaching and learning material is highly adaptable and available for free for inclusion into any HE curriculum of every related subject, thus supporting the overall goal of the CHePiCC, to facilitate a behavioral change concerning cultural heritage protection in climate change by enabling HE students and with them future professional generations to build their future on our common past.
The main & long-term aim of this project was a) to bring heritage back into HE teaching & learning, to enable future generations to protect cultural heritage and to facilitate a behavioral change concerning cultural heritage protection and climate change, especially in the prospective professional lives of HE learners and teachers and b) to enable HE teachers to build and deliver engaging and high quality distance and blended learning formats, which are held online or in a hybrid version. More specifically, the immediately tangible objectives of the project were a) a MOOC on Cultural Heritage Protection in Climate Change and b) the tested and evaluated concept for a transdisciplinary, hybrid summer school on cultural landscapes in climate change. Both are freely available online and will target the main need identified when creating the project, the need to bring cultural heritage and its protection back into society and to foster the understanding of its importance.
Following a series of high-profile research programs initiated by the EU on protecting cultural heritage, the partner consortium applied for this project because a) the project partners had contributed to several EU-funded research programmes on cultural heritage protection and climate change and b) they had identified the lack of high-quality online teaching on the topic. The latter was made more visible by the then persistent Covid-19 lockdowns all over the world and the requests of students and HE learners for high-quality online programmes. The partner consortium decided to apply for this project in order to translate state-of-the-art research from recent or ongoing EU-funded projects in the field of cultural heritage protection and climate change into state-of-the-art online teaching modules, with the add-on of a blended learning equivalent in form of an on-site summer school. The main need addressed by the project was the basic academic need to bring cultural heritage and its protection back into society and to foster the understanding of its importance, its shared values and identities. The more tangible needs were to build inclusive, modular and transdisciplinary learning programmes for HE learners.