Up to university, Tiago! Up2U, Peter!

Up to university, Tiago! Up2U, Peter!


This year’s TNC – the largest and most prestigious European research networking conference – offered the opportunity for students to present a lightning talk before an international audience of more than 750 participants. Students had 5 minutes to deliver an elevator pitch on a topic of interest. 

Tiago José Castro, multimedia student from ESMAD, sponsored by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) was selected to present his pitch at the TNC main stage. In his talk on ‘Distributed Learning Based On Free Open Educational Resources’ Tiago explained the challenges that students face today when they enter the university. He said: “Most of us have problems with the online tools that we suddenly have to use. Electronic student information systems, lecture recordings in video stores, learning management systems, all of that. We didn’t have these at schools. Also, we have difficulties to adapt to the new teaching style in higher education. We have to be much more independent, we have more freedom to choose from knowledge sources, we can take different learning paths. The assessments are also different from the typical ones at school”.

Up2U project leader Peter Szegedi, Project Development Officer at GÉANT came on stage to tell Tiago some ‘good news’ and talked about what the Up2U project is working on: “We take all of our knowledge and expertise as well as tools from the research and higher education community and adapt them to the secondary schools context. We’ll facilitate cross-learning activities between universities and schools and launch pilots to introduce novel pedagogical aspects”. The fun and unique lightning talk ended with a pact between the two. “Up2 University, Tiago!”, “Up to University, Peter!”

For more information on Up2U, contact us here: contact@lists.up2university.eu

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