Up2U gathers for a techno-pedagogical workshop in Athens

The second all-hands meeting was jointly organised by the project partners NTUA and GRNET on 23-25 January in Athens, Greece. About 40 people representing the project partners and invited experts discussed the current progress and future plans of the project. It was the second workshop, this time focusing on techno-pedagogical aspects, with the aim at bringing technology and pedagogy together.

Up2U’s main priority in the second project year is to launch the initial school pilots and start a closer collaboration with our main user community; the secondary education. In order to execute the pilot plans, the Up2U learning platform and tools ecosystem need to provide its minimum viable features reliably. A number of sessions were dedicated to refining our platform elements and processes taking the initial feedback of the school representatives into account. A technology ‘Bazaar’ was organised that gave the opportunity of live demonstrations for the different application tools and infrastructure services that are forming our current ecosystem: CERNBox, DSpace, eduOER, SelCont, H5P, WebRTC. After presenting the tools, the pedagogy people had the opportunity to brainstorm about the usage of those tools for developing certain teaching and learning methods and skills.

We agreed to launch several components of the ecosystem into production for the first pilot phase. Moodle and eduOER have already been in production, the WebSSO solution for federated authentication provided by GWDG is a new essential element. The project agreed to use Moodle’s in-built features for authorisation and group management and make it accessible by other tools for the moment. CERNbox at PSNC with storage capacity and WebSSO integration is also a new infrastructure service complementing the DSpace repository, both have been launched into production.

Selected schools in Italy, Greece, Poland and the internal education programme of CERN will be included in the first phase of the Up2U pilots. Other countries such as Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain will join the second phase of the pilot and will incorporate the lessons learned from the first phase. Early results like common frameworks for pedagogy and technology and best practices are expected to be produced by the summer.

The pedagogical aspects of the project are crucial. Thanks to our survey results and face-to-face consultations, we now have a clear view on the needs and the requirements of the schools and learning communities. We invited Greek teachers and students from 6 pilot schools in the Athens region to share their initial ideas and thoughts regarding our project and mission. These inputs are highly appreciated and being incorporated into our ecosystem roadmap.

Up2U is going to be present at multiple international educational conferences and events in the first half of the year. Several talks were accepted to INTED, we will have presentations and training workshops at EDUCON and TNC’18 conferences.

The second General Assembly meeting will be early July in Poznan, Poland. This future all hands meeting will focus on the first EC review preparation and will highlight the outcomes of the first pilot phase.