Frequently Asked Questions
Find answers about European Skills Lab, learning materials, licences, AI functionality, project hosting, privacy and participation.
General
European Skills Lab brings together open educational resources created through European projects and makes them easier to discover, access and reuse. Materials are organised by project, described, and searchable — with AI-assisted discovery on top of the ordinary search. Why European Skills Lab exists explains the background in more detail.
European Skills Lab is an initiative operated by ACEEU — the Accreditation Council for Entrepreneurial and Engaged Universities — based in Münster, Germany. ACEEU works internationally with universities, educational institutions and European projects. Full operator details are in the Legal Notice; ACEEU’s own website is www.aceeu.org.
Yes. Browsing projects, downloading materials and using the AI Assistant are free and require no login. An account is only needed if you want to publish your own materials, and hosting is currently free of charge for EU projects.
Anyone. Educators, learners, project teams and the general public can browse and download without registering. If you want to publish materials, registration is open to everyone and takes about a minute — you give a name and an e-mail address, and your password arrives by e-mail.
Slides, reports, handbooks, exercises, toolkits, videos and more — whatever the projects produced. Each project keeps its own folder structure, and folders and files carry descriptions, so you can see what a resource is before you download it.
European Skills Lab focuses on resources created through European projects, most of them EU-funded. Every project page names the funding programme it belongs to — currently Erasmus+ lines, Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, European Universities and the Joint Research Centre. The list of programmes grows as new projects join.
Resources are available in the language or languages their projects produced them in, so this varies from project to project. We hold no language metadata, so we would rather not quote a distribution we cannot back, and there is no language filter yet. Improving multilingual discovery is on our roadmap.
Finding and using materials
No. Browsing projects, previewing files, downloading materials and asking the AI Assistant all work without an account. An account is only needed to publish your own project’s materials.
Yes, free of charge. You can download a single file, a whole folder, or a project’s complete materials as one ZIP archive. What you may then do with a file is governed by the Creative Commons licence shown for it — and where none is shown, you have no reuse rights.
That depends on the Creative Commons licence in the “Copyright license” box on the project, folder or file page. Most of the accepted licences let you adapt and translate a resource and share the result, with credit to the original authors — under the “ND” (NoDerivatives) licences you may adapt or translate a resource for your own use, but you may not share the adapted version. Read that box before you adapt anything: if it is empty, you have no reuse rights.
Use the search box in the header: it searches organisations, projects, folders and files, and adds a meaning-based AI pass that can find relevant material even when your words differ from ours. For a question in your own words, ask the AI Assistant. Project pages also carry tags you can follow to related projects.
Not yet. Saving favourites and building personal collections are planned features, not part of the platform today. What exists now is the AI Assistant’s course pack: it gathers files during your visit so you can download them together, but the selection is not kept after you leave.
Today you can ask the AI Assistant for material on your topic, add the files it cites to a course pack, and download that pack as a ZIP with a README listing each source and its licence, or noting where none is recorded. A full course and learning path builder is planned — see the roadmap for what is coming.
Each file carries a description and an EQF level (its own, or the one its project declares), PDFs, images and videos can be previewed in the browser before you download them, and the project page around the file tells you who produced it and why. European Skills Lab does not certify a resource as suitable for a particular group: that judgement stays with you.
AI Assistant and course creation
You describe what you want to teach or learn in your own words, and the assistant tells you what material exists in European Skills Lab and where to find it, citing every source it used. You can add the cited files to a course pack and download them together, ask for more items like a particular one, or re-ask your question within the selection you have made. It finds and organises materials that already exist here — it does not write new ones.
It compares the meaning of your question with the descriptions and search texts of published materials rather than matching keywords, and puts the closest matches in front of you. Only published projects are searched, and the most relevant sources are cited in the answer so you can check them yourself.
No. It can assemble existing resources into a course pack that you download as a ZIP — a set of files with a README, not an authored course. An AI-supported learning path builder that would sequence materials for you is a planned feature; it does not exist today.
It recommends existing materials — discovery and organisation, not content creation. AI does write short descriptive texts here: the answers on the assistant page, and file descriptions where a project has not written its own. Those descriptions carry an “AI generated” label so you can tell them apart. No new educational content is produced.
You decide what a course pack contains: add and remove files before you download it, and re-ask your question within your selection to see how the answer changes. Richer editing — reordering, annotating or keeping a pack — is part of the planned course builder rather than something you can do today.
Recommendations are suggestions, and the judgement is deliberately left with you: no one reviews each individual match. AI-written descriptions are labelled as such and the project owners can correct them, and every project is checked by an administrator before it is published.
When it writes descriptions it reads PDFs, images and the modern Office formats — .docx, .xlsx and .pptx. The legacy binary formats .doc, .xls and .ppt cannot be read, and neither can video or audio. Files the model cannot read are described by the project owners instead, and those descriptions are what the assistant then works with.
No. Our AI provider is OpenAI, a Data Processing Addendum with OpenAI is in place, and the data we send is not used to train OpenAI’s models. The Privacy Policy describes the current arrangement, including the safeguards that cover transfers outside the EU.
Licences and reuse
Every project submitted through the platform chooses a Creative Commons licence — the submission form requires one — and its files inherit that licence unless a file carries a licence of its own. A few older projects were imported before that rule existed and show no licence at all — see what happens when licensing information is missing.
Six, all version 4.0: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND. Projects choose from that list; no other licence can be selected.
On every project, folder and file page. A project page heads the box “Copyright license”; a folder page “Project copyright license”; a file page carries both — “Copyright license” for the file itself, which also says whether that licence is “File specific” or “Inherited from the project”, and “Project copyright license” for the project it belongs to. A box with no licence to show reads “N/A”. Licences are recorded in a downloaded course pack’s README as well.
Yes, whenever you share it. All six accepted licences include the Attribution (BY) condition, which applies when you share a resource — on its own or, where the licence allows that, as part of something you have adapted. The project page names the organisations behind the material.
Only where the licence carries no NonCommercial condition: CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC BY-ND permit commercial use with attribution. The three NC licences — CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND — do not. Always check the licence box on the resource you intend to use: where no licence is shown you have no reuse rights at all, commercial or otherwise.
The projects and creators who produced them. European Skills Lab hosts and presents the material and does not acquire ownership of it; what anyone may do with a resource is governed by the Creative Commons licence shown for it. Where no licence is shown, no reuse rights are granted.
New submissions require a licence, but a few projects imported before that rule show none. A resource with an empty licence box grants you no reuse rights, so please do not reuse it on the assumption that it is open. Write to mail@skills-lab.eu and we will clarify the licence with the project.
For EU Project Managers
Yes. You can publish materials while the project runs and keep adding to them, and they stay available beyond the funding period. Many teams start early, so their dissemination has a stable address to point at from the first month.
Yes — that is the point of the platform. Project websites are usually switched off soon after the funding ends, and European Skills Lab is intended to be the place where the outputs stay reachable. We keep materials online as a matter of intent rather than a contractual retention commitment; if your programme requires a specific guarantee, talk to us first.
European Skills Lab is open to projects from European programmes. The list already includes Erasmus+ lines, Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, European Universities and the Joint Research Centre, and it is extended as projects arrive — during project setup you can add your own programme if it is not there yet.
Any file type. Documents, slides, spreadsheets, images, audio, video and archives are all accepted — there is no format whitelist — and the folder structure you upload is preserved as it is.
There is no fixed storage quota per project. The limits you will meet are browser-upload limits rather than storage rules: files are uploaded in batches of up to 20 files or about 200 MB, and a single file over 200 MB cannot be uploaded through the browser. Please contact us for very large files.
For your own projects: total downloads and data served, breakdowns per project and per month, the most-downloaded files, the split between single files and ZIP archives, a file-type split, a log of recent downloads, date filters and CSV export. Beyond that, the public statistics page shows platform-wide figures, and every project and file offers an embeddable download-counter badge for your own website. More detailed impact analytics are on the roadmap.
You can upload whole folders in the browser, which recreates your structure as it is. For a large collection the team can import it for you instead — write to mail@skills-lab.eu and describe what you have.
You control the content: logo, description, the organisations involved, the funding programme, tags, website links, EQF levels and the licence, plus the whole materials tree with its descriptions. The visual design is the shared platform design — there is no free-form theming, which is what keeps every project equally readable and comparable.
Hosting is currently free of charge for EU projects. If you have an unusually large collection or a special requirement, contact us at mail@skills-lab.eu and we will discuss it with you.
Register an account, then create your project with the four-step wizard: choose the organisations involved, choose the funding programme, fill in the project details and logo, and upload your materials. An administrator then reviews the project and publishes it.
You can edit your project and its materials at any time — upload new files, remove outdated ones and adjust descriptions — and you can give colleagues edit access to the project so they can do the same. Changes to a published project are live immediately.
Resources are intended to stay available long-term, well beyond the funded period, and nothing is scheduled for removal. We would rather state that plainly than quote a retention period we have not committed to — if your project needs a specific commitment, contact the team.
Accounts, privacy and accessibility
For registered users, account data: name, e-mail address and optionally an organisation. For everyone, usage records — pages visited, searches, questions to the AI Assistant and downloads — each stored with your IP address and browser information and anonymised after 60 months. We set one cookie of our own, the session cookie; reCAPTCHA is the only third party contacted and may set its own. There are no analytics or advertising trackers. The Privacy Policy has the full detail.
Yes, and you can do it yourself: open your profile and choose “Close your account”. Closure is permanent (GDPR Art. 17) — your personal details are removed from the account, published projects stay online without your name, and you choose what should happen to your drafts. If you would rather we did it for you, write to mail@skills-lab.eu.
Yes. Every search and every question to the AI Assistant is recorded with its text, your IP address and your browser information, as described in the Privacy Policy, and anonymised after 60 months. We keep the text because it tells us what people look for and do not find — so please avoid typing personal or confidential information into those boxes.
We would rather describe the measures than award ourselves a verdict. The legal bases for each processing operation are documented in the Privacy Policy, the platform is hosted in Germany (Hetzner), processing agreements are in place with our providers including the AI provider, and Standard Contractual Clauses cover transfers outside the EU. The Privacy Policy is the authoritative statement of how data is processed.
We build with semantic page structure, keyboard-usable navigation, accordions and tabs, contrast-checked colours, and dark mode plus text-size controls available to everyone in the header. We hold no accessibility certification and make no conformance claim for a particular standard. If something is hard to use, tell us at mail@skills-lab.eu and we will look at it.
Write to mail@skills-lab.eu with the address of the project or file. AI-written descriptions carry an “AI generated” label, and the project owners can correct any description themselves at any time.
Support
Write to mail@skills-lab.eu — the “Contact” link in the footer of every page. That address reaches us for anything: content questions, accounts, technical problems and data-protection requests.
E-mail mail@skills-lab.eu with what you did and what happened; the page address and a screenshot help a lot. During the beta phase the beta page also carries a one-click “Report an Issue” button that opens a pre-addressed e-mail for you.
If it is your own project, register and submit it through the project wizard — that is the fastest route. If you have spotted a European project whose materials belong here, or you are unsure whether yours fits, e-mail us first at mail@skills-lab.eu.
Use the feature-suggestion form. It goes straight to the team, and during the beta phase every suggestion feeds into what we build next.
We read everything that arrives and reply as soon as we can. There is no formal response-time guarantee — we would rather not promise one we cannot always keep — but no message is ignored.
No matching questions. Try a different word, or ask us directly.
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