A survey ran at national level in 2020 highlighted that half of the inquiries (50%) did not know much about Copernicus or had never heard about the programme. An effort to increase awareness and training across all sectors is therefore needed, with the present action focusing on the higher education sector – which feeds in the medium-term all the other areas of activity. This action will complement the national user strategy plan which includes also other activities such as summer schools and funding opportunities for PhD studies in Earth Observation. For an effective uptake at higher education level, the activities will include not only awareness events but promote training sessions to allow students to be able use the Copernicus data and services, or even go further and be able to develop new applications and eventually create their own jobs. This action includes the development of a MOOC in Portuguese composed of a series of educational modules, presenting the Copernicus Programme, the different services available and applications that can arise from the (free) data it provides, targeting different specific examples relevant for the European scenario, while focusing mainly on Portugal. A series of transversal interactive workshops for students from different fields (e.g. engineering, environmental sciences, biology, business and others) to share knowledge and ideas on the potential of Earth Observation and Copernicus in particular; and a Final (business oriented) challenge for higher education students, strongly multi-disciplinary and, thus, implying that students interact and team up with colleagues from different fields (e.g. engineering, environmental sciences, marine sciences, computing science, business, etc.) to solve a problem within a thematic scope that is posed to them making use of Copernicus. The final prize can include an interaction with the regional start-up incubators to help develop the winning project(s).

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