Crossing the borders and the cultural gaps for educating PhDs in software engineering

Software systems have established themselves as the heart of business and everyday living, and as the pillar of the emerging global digital economy. This puts pressure on educational institutions to train people for the continuously evolving software industry, which puts additional demand for new PhDs and educators. While large universities and research centres have the required expertise and infrastructure to providing a cost-effective training by research as well as covering wide spectrum of software engineering topics, the situation in small universities with limited resources is challenging. This is even more difficult for some countries where the discipline of software engineering is totally new, which is the case of emerging countries. This paper describes the Pathways to PhDs project funded by the European Commission. The long-term aim is to support the development, modernization and international visibility and excellence of higher education, namely education by research at the PhD level in Europe, while helping partner countries to develop new PhD programs and consolidate existing ones in the field of computing in the area of software engineering. This paper presents the creation of a common educational framework that consist of seven specialized short-intensive schools, each of them feature the expertise and "savoir-faire" of participating universities. The collaboration and communication among partners and the schools is supported by an innovative communication platform, which is also presented in the paper.