Community engagement at EDULEARN’17

First time for the project – not the first time for many project partners of course – Up2U presented at Europe’s largest education conference EDULEARN’17 on 3-5 July 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. Five papers have been accepted for oral presentations in four different sessions that covered all the relevant aspects of the Up2U project and its Next Generation Learning Platform under development.

EDULEARN is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists and professionals from the educational sector. 830 experts from 80 countries got together in Barcelona to present their projects and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and educational innovations.

Our presenters where Antonio Vieira de Castro, Up2U Board Member and Marílio Cardoso, both professors at ISEP, Ilias Hatzakis, infrastructure lead at GRNET and Peter Szegedi, project coordinator at GÉANT. We received positive feedback and many interests from Europe and other parts of the world. It was inspiring to see how educators use technology that is available to them in many innovative ways. While YouTube, Facebook, Twitter as well as Google+ tools and services are significantly used, many educators are looking for a trusted and integrated service platform that is easy to use, lowers the entry barrier for students and staff (i.e. eliminates the initial “fear”) and that would allow them to break the technology silos and truly engage with the essence of education, that is learning.

We trust that all the federated tools and services that Up2U is packaging together with the added value of enhanced learning analytics and access to quality content would serve the need of the 21st century “connected teacher”.