Let me give you a quick update on the current status of the Up2U project as of 15 November 2017 (M11).

*Platform development* (WP3, WP4)

Attached are two slide decks, one with the general Concept and the other one with the detailed Architecture.

The current status of the various software elements and their service integration is summarised on this Wiki page:
Progress on the Platform

Following the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) concept, our goal its to design an ecosystem where the individual tools and services are integrated together but also able to function alone. Federated login, group management, learning analytics and reward systems are the components working across all tools and services in the ecosystem allowing us to control users and know everything about their leaning progress.

Our current priority is to launch the 1st Minimum Valuable Product by January 2018 as the latest. This will be the basis of our 1st Pilot Phase with the schools.

Some features, like the federated login (GWDG Proxy), learning management system (Moodle), learning record store (LRS) are crucial for the operations, others such as all the LIT tools, Jupyter, ownCloud, eduOER, etc. are desirable to a meaningful product.

Deliverable 3.2 describing the entire architecture is due to December 2017!


*Pedagogy* (WP5)

The Deliverable 5.2 is at the GÉANT Technical Authors for final review before submission. This is a very nice piece of work, tremendous efforts pulled by the WP5 team. I would strongly recommend all participants to read the deliverable (once out) and be familiar with the pedagogical concepts behind our technical developments.

There is a slide deck attached that is the brief summary of the Deliverable 5.2 (if you don't want to read a lot).

Next step would be to apply the desired Up2U pedagogy (teacher's training, student' open kerning path, skills' development, etc.) to the Up2U platform and see what tools and services can support it and in what ways.

Feedback from the early pilot school communities is necessary!


*Pilot coordination and SMC* (WP5, WP7)

The Pilot slides attached include a quick overview on our roadmap. We are about the launch the first pilot and we need to make sure that we coordinate and communicate this well with the pilot schools.

We have to activate our SMC and other advisory functions! We have to approach our pilot schools (especially those who filled out the WP5 surveys) and provide information to them. Signing our MoU for participating in the Up2U pilots would be crucial. The MoU is being checked by the GDPR experts as we speak, will soon be ready.

We should also approach our universities and see how we can support the teachers' training. As it was pointed out by WP5, teaches' training and student's courses should be aligned.

Let's start designing some concrete training courses and make them available on our Moodle platform. These Up2U trainings can then be complemented by any other Third-party trainings/course that we found relevant and able to integrate into our Moodle.

For the pilot coordination it is essential to make the 1st Pilot platform ready, but the underlying support is equally important.

Deliverable 7.2 is due to December 2017.


*Communications* (WP2)

The Up2U Website has recently been refreshed by WP2. I believe, it gives a very nice starting point to all of our stakeholders. I'm actually getting more and more interest form all kinds of directions (commercials, outside Europe, etc.) in the project.

We need to polish and make available our comprehensive marketing plan addressing all potential users and other stakeholders ASAP.

We have had good visibility at international events and conferences. Efforts are always appreciated.

Some conference deadlines are approaching:
- EDUCON full paper - 20 Nov
- INTED 2018 - 30 Nov
- TNC'18 - 30 Nov

Keep up the good work and contribute!

Deliverable 2.2 summarising all these efforts is due to January 2018 (would be good to  make it available by the paper-based review)


*Sustainability* (WP8)

We are getting interest from commercials, especially cloud providers in the IaaS space to host our platform for schools. This is essential for the longer term sustainability especially in pilot countries where the NREN is not operating a national cloud for education.

We need to speed up the work on collecting and analysing potential business models in order to give appropriate answers to these commercial interest.

We have identified several pilots in WP8 to investigate scenarios, not only platform hosting, but content development, and else.

Deliverable 8.1 is due to December 2017!


*Administration* (WP1)

We have been requested by the EC to participate in a so called paper-based review in January 2018. For this we have to provide all the deliverables due to M12, a quick financial summary, and some support documents to the reviewers. They may come back with some questions and recommendations that we have to implement by the official face-to-face review due to M18 (practically late summer 2018).

For the financial summary, I believe we can provide the 2017Q3 figures (Jan-Sep 2017), so we have to collect these *from all partners* ASAP. Please, fill out the finance report sheet and send it to Munya at GÉANT.

We have already fixed the travel budget for some partners and reshuffled some of the person month to reflect better the actual consumption. More adjustments are possible as we go!

Meetings

- We plan for the 2nd Technical Worksop (similar that we had in Porto) in January in Rome, Italy hosted by UROMA. This could also serve as our Launch Event for Phase 1 (MVP1) and a community event where we can meet some Italian users.

- In 2018, we do need a GA (all-hands) meeting as well that we can use for the EC review preparations. This should happen over the summer. Volunteers for hosting are welcome!

- The EC review will take place in Luxembourg sometimes after June 2018, we don't know the exact dates yet. I would rather prefer July than August but we'll see.

That's all folks!

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK...

Peter

*WP1* - Management

The 60% pre-financing was transferred to all partners on 21 February 2017.

Only one signature is missing from the Consortium Agreement (CERN), will soon be distributed to all.

Financial reporting is needed quarterly. Finance mailing list will be reminded in March. There was an excel template distributed on the list for the reports.

Budget on the "other direct cost" line can be spent on hosting face-to-face meetings (venue and catering, no dinner) and/or hosting infrastructure (only for infrastructure partners justified in Annex 1: storage, VMs, etc.).

GÉANT is going to distribute more budget on the "travel" budget line to all partners after Year 1. This needs contract amendment (together with other potential changes)!

NIIF, Hungary changed its name to KIFU. It is already administered by the EC. Contract amendment is not needed for this.

Subcontracting is only allowed to UROMA. For others, needs contract amendment.

Hardware equipment cannot be bought under this project.

The General Assembly unanimously appointed the Up2U Board Members:
Gabriella Paolini - GARR, Italy
John Domingue - Open University, UK
Eli Shmueli - IUCC, Israel
Antonio Vieira de Castro - ISEP, Portugal
Vicente Goyanes - TELTEK, Spain

The board meets quarterly (via video), checks the partners' financial reports, the deliverables due in the period, advices the Management Team and/or escalates to General Assembly.

The next coming face-to-face meeting will be in early May (first or second week) in Portugal (either Lisbon or Porto). The following meeting could be in October time-frame in Poland (TBC).