Focusing on smart cities and particularly, on the development of educational programs aimed at knowledge acquisition and skills building for emerging and future smart city professions in Southeast Asian countries, a highly successful capacity-building workshop was held for the benefit of selected Asian universities. The activity took place in person on July 21–22, 2025, as part of the “SCALe – Smart City ASEAN Learning Network” European project. It was co-organized by the DAISSy Research Group of the Hellenic Open University (HOU), the Greek partner of SCALe, and the National University of Management of Cambodia (NUMC). It was hosted at the university’s facilities in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with the primary goal of transferring know-how from European to Asian universities.
The workshop serves the main goal of the SCALe project, namely to develop a set of short courses based on smart city skills, which may supplement or enhance existing academic programs, or even be combined, so as to form new ones.
Specifically, the first day of the workshop was dedicated to presentations on technological, structural, and educational topics. Achilles Kameas, Professor at the Hellenic Open University, Director of DAISSy, presented relevant European frameworks, policies, and tools supporting digital citizenship, whereas Dr. Theodoros Panagiotakopoulos, Project Manager and Researcher at DAISSy, delivered a speech on the role of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities.
During the sessions of the second day of the workshop, the developers of the short courses presented their structure and content. The main objective was to ensure a clear understanding of the requirements and pedagogical approach for delivering these courses by the academic and teaching staff of every university participating in the SCALe consortium.
In parallel, DAISSy-HOU fully exploited all possibilities provided by the workshop, in order to strengthen existing collaborations with Southeast Asian universities and to forge new partnerships, aiming at knowledge exchange and the joint development of future initiatives.
SCALe is a three-year project (July 2023 – June 2026), co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, which is implemented by a consortium of fourteen (14) partners across two (2) EU Member States (Greece and Italy) and three (3) Asian countries (Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand), with the DAISSy Research Group of the HOU, being the Greek partner.
For more information about the SCALe project, undergoing by DAISSy-HOU:
