Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Up2U (Up to University - Bridging the gap between schools and universities through informal education)

Teaser

The key objective of the project is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and higher education & 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...

Summary

The key objective of the project is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and higher education & 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.
Up2U focuses on a specific learning context and very formative period represented by secondary schools that in most European countries provide education to children between the ages of 11 and 19.
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.

Work performed

The following work have been performed between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2017:
Work Package 1 established the necessary project management frameworks. Management tools was selected, weekly Work Package leaders’ meetings have been scheduled. After a virtual kick-off meeting, the first GA meeting was held in Amsterdam where the Project Board was elected. In May, the first all-hands took place in Porto together with the first Board meeting. The second Board meeting in September 2017. The quarterly financial reporting mechanism has also been established. The external liaison partners of the project have been contacted. As a result, Up2U has agreed to sign a MoU with the SELFIE project of the European Commission for assessing and enhancing digital education at schools.
Work Package 2 reached its first milestone early on by establishing the public project website a communication plan. Throughout the year, the communications strategy has been defined with dedicated messages to the key stakeholder groups. The relevant national and international conferences have been listed, several presentations and papers were submitted. The most relevant one was the TNC’17 conference where Up2U sponsored a student to present at the young talent session with big success. The full list of publications is available on the project website. A social media team has also been established.
Work Package 3 Defined the architecture of the Up2U ecosystem following the state-of-the-art Next Generation Digital Learning Environment design principles. The network and connectivity requirements of schools has been analysed and evaluated as the basic infrastructure component of Up2U relying on connectivity of the National Research and Education Networks and GÉANT in Europe. WP3 defined and deployed the main platform components of Up2U, a “Toolbox” for generic web-based teaching and learning tools to be integrated into the ecosystem.
Work Package 4 was responsible for this aforementioned toolbox. Several features, applications and tools have been identified and assessed taking into account the pedagogical needs. Most of the tools in the first phase of the project were related to the digital competency of teachers and students and their generic media and information literacy skills. The selected tools were multimedia recording and playback tools, authoring tools, real-time communications tools, document sharing tools, interactive notebooks, etc.
Work Package 5 defined the Up2U pedagogy taking into account state-of-the-art research on the education field and well as own survey results. Three extensive surveys have been designed, distributed to the identified pilot schools and university partners in 9 countries to collect feedback on the pedagogy and skills design of Up2U. More than 280 innovative school teachers and staff provided input to the pedagogical aspects that have been summarised in the key Deliverable D5.2 “Interaction model design”. The Subject Matter Committee (SMC) of the project has also been established.
Work Package 6 established its own surveys too in order to get first-hand experience with the information and infrastructure security and privacy considerations of schools. The security and privacy roadmap for the project have been outlined, GDPR regulations plans are made. The first deliverable of the WP also served as the Open Research Data Pilot participation statement, including the mandatory Data Management Plan that has been created.
Work Package 7 established the basic pilot coordination functions, but most importantly, took care of the infrastructure deployment, operations and continual improvement actions following an agile Minimum Viable Product development cycle. The Up2U platform and its open source software components, integration elements and configurations have been established supported by software management tools and processes. Quality Control Mechanisms and a central Risk Register have been created and shared with al

Final results

Up2U will build and train the learning community. Up2U is going to gradually engage with a few thousand schools in 7-8 countries with a potential further extension to 18 countries in Europe. We are going to liaise closely with the European School Network, European Schoolnet, Schola Europeas, Inspiring Science and Open Discovery Space / School Innovation Catalyst projects’ communities. We already established MoU with the SELFIE project of the EC.
Up2U is going to measure the baseline at the beginning of the project in terms of the success rate of university enrolments across the pilot schools; this measure will be checked and reported in every improvement cycles of the project.

Website & more info

More info: https://up2university.eu/.