The key objective of the project is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and higher education and research by better integrating formal and informal learning scenarios and adapting both the technology and the methodology that students will most likely be facing in universities.
| We are focusing on the context of secondary schools, often referred to as high schools, which provide secondary education between the ages of 11 and 19 depending on the country, after primary school and before higher education. The learning context from the perspective of the students is the intersection of formal and informal spaces, a dynamic hybrid learning environment where synchronous activities meet in both virtual and real dimensions. For this, we propose to develop an innovative Up to University (Up2U) ecosystem – based on proven experiences in higher education and big research – that facilitates open, more effective and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of digital content, tools and services adapted for personalised learning and teaching of high school students preparing for university. We will address project based learning and peer-to-peer learning scenarios. We strongly believe that all the tools and services the project is going to use and/or make available (i.e. incorporate, design, develop and test) must be sustainable after the lifetime of the project. Therefore, the project is going to develop business plans and investigate appropriate business models using the expertise of the Small Medium Enterprise and National Research and Education Network partners and their contacts with third-party business actors. Our plan is to make it easy for new schools to join the Up2U infrastructure and ecosystem that will form a federated market-place for the learning community. |
Innovation Action (No.732049) - 5 Million Euro funding for 3 years - Starting in January 2017
18 Partners from 12 Countries across Europe
”Countries that lack natural population growth due to low birthrates and at the same time are major senders of immigrants to other countries face the severe risk of contraction of higher education institutions, stagnation within the education market as well as the labor market, and thus a decline in economic growth.”
Demographic Trends and Risks for European Higher Education
Fatma Mizikaci and Bernd Baumgartl
"About 63% of nine year olds in the EU are in schools that are still not digitally equipped although 90% of jobs will require digital skills by 2020."
The "Opening Up Education" policy of the European Commission
"Age differences, however, are more pronounced for private or mobile Internet use with teenagers aged 15-16 years old far more likely, about 84%, to access the Internet in their own bedroom."
7 Objectives
- To assess the use of public and private cloud-based infrastructure services with proven track records in higher education and research, integrating and adapting them to the specific learning context of schools.
- To design and develop a scalable and flexible integrated “application toolbox”, which supports student-driven, personalised, dynamic learning path creation with social sharing and interactions (i.e. project-based and peer-to-peer learning and assessment) on top of the abovementioned cloud-based service infrastructure.
- To build and train the learning community for the specific learning context and to facilitate the development of the critical thinking by students and tutoring role of teachers that are essential in an informal learning environment.
- To propose an executable roadmap for ensuring security and privacy. Specifically, the project will address filtering of network traffic at schools, handling of intellectual property rights, copyright materials, student identity, and the right to choose data storage locations.
- To roll out and test the infrastructure service components and the application toolbox through very large-scale pilots in at least 7 European countries (Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland and Portugal) to identify strategies for scaling and achieving bigger impacts.
- To develop, establish and operate a continuous risk assessment function during the entire lifetime of the project and to liaise with other related projects and initiatives.
- To define an effective sustainability and exploitation framework based on GÉANT’s NREN community, their existing customer base, SME partners and connected schools in order to mainstream learning solutions for secondary education that are proven in higher education and research contexts.