BlueBRIDGE - Blue skills activity: interim report

The goal of Blue Skills is to develop and deploy Virtual Research Environments (VREs) essential for boosting education and knowledge bridging between research and innovation in the area of protection and management of marine resources. In order to achieve this goal, plans have been laid for real courses, both with physical attendance and online courses, which have been, and continue to be implemented throughout the project span. The course programme is expected to evolve during the project lifetime, e.g. new courses to be supported can be constantly identified. The initial list has been produced in October 2015 (MS4 Blue Skills VRE Plan) and whenever a course to be supported is identified it is recorded through dedicated tickets. The up to date list of target courses is always available by an automatic report available at https://support.d4science.org/issues/684. Depending on the characteristics of each course either a new Virtual Laboratory can be created or one or more existing ones can be re-used to support the activity of course participants. In the reporting period, 15 courses took place with the support of 7 dedicated VLabs. These courses were attended by more than 335 participants in total.