Overview
“Education is about learning – Sir Ken Robinson”
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. We are focusing on the context of secondary schools, often referred to as high schools, which provide secondary education between the ages of 11 and 19 depending on the country, after primary school and before higher education. This initiative aims to respond to the requirements of a clear mandate from the European Commission allied with the provision of new cloud-based tools and services to enhance primary and secondary education in Europe. Up2U is a 36 month collaborative project with 5M Euro funding that kicked off in January this year. This project is coordinated by GÉANT and gathers 18 partners from 12 countries across Europe including NRENs, traditional and open universities, infrastructure providers and two commercial partners.
Goals

Partners
The Up2U project is coordinated by GÉANT, which for many years has been offering a forum to collaborate, innovate and share knowledge in order to foster developments in technology, infrastructures, and services for the benefit of the research and education community. Our consortium members have extensive experience in collaborative projects, especially those that adapt business models to allow technological changes, boost the level and assessment of digital skills and support teachers’ development through open online courses and open educational resources.
National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)
The e-infrastructure (NREN) partners of the consortium provide e-infrastructure (primarily network) services to schools and bring expertise in the area of security, federated trust and identity, and educational application service development. They offer virtualized infrastructure resources for the project out of their national data centers and cloud service delivery infrastructures. The NREN partners are: GARR (Italy), GRNET (Greece), FCT (Portugal), IUCC (Israel), KIFU (Hungary), PSNC (Poland), and the LITNET networking department in KTU (Lithuania).
Universities
The university partners of the consortium bring their expertise in teaching and learning methodologies and pedagogy, in general. They contribute their first hand experiences with novel learning models and application tools supporting formal and informal learning scenarios. The university partners are: OU (UK), UROMA (Italy), NTUA (Greece), UVIGO (Spain), ISEP (Portugal), TAU (Israel), and KTU (Lithuania).
Big Research Institutes
The big research institute partners of the consortium make sure that the Up2U ecosystem is efficiently linked to big research in order to develop innovative and motivational learning scenarios for high school students who can use the same or similar tools and services as the researchers. They also bring their cloud infrastructure resources and services. These partners are GWDG (Germany) and CERN (Switzerland).
Small Medium Enterprises
The commercial SME partners of the consortium provide excellence in software development in their respective technical area and also bring the commercial approach and business relations in cooperation with those NREN partners that also operate on a commercial or semi-commercial basis. The vendor partners of Up2U are: the multimedia software company TELTEK in Spain and the file sync and share service platform developer company OWNCLOUD in Germany.
Community
The Up2U project supports a large international community of users and collaborators, consisting of students, teachers, high schools, universities, as well as governments, content providers and other European projects and partnerships.Students
Our project helps you to adapt to new learning scenarios that will be useful when attending to a university. Experimenting with the informal learning spaces and develop new skills that will be inevitable in higher education. Up2U promotes technology in the classroom – no more boring classes! Engage with your fellow peers, explore the international Up2U universe and ecosystem and experience with the digital reward system. Say goodbye to the old chalkboard and enjoy the era of digital classes.Teachers
Have you noticed that keeping up the attention span of teenagers is getting more difficult? In a world where digital technology rules the world, why not benefit from it? Incorporating digital tools and services in your teaching method can result in more engaged students and helps them developing “critical thinking” and be more independent learners. Introducing value-added learning analytics and community-based digital reward system changes the learning scenario thus it becomes more adaptive to students liking.High schools
Up2U project is building a community that can support the new trends and methods of digital teaching and learning. We provide tools and services that will help you implement digital learning scenarios in the classroom. A heterogeneous training plan is being elaborated that would be able to accommodate training teachers with different technology backgrounds. Pilot schools from various European countries will experiment with our concept and will share their lessons learned. Skills that can be acquired via these digital learning methods can drive up your enrolments with students ready for higher education.Universities
Getting into a university can be challenging, but not dropping out can also be burdensome. We think that by providing the essential skills that a freshman might need early on his university career could prevent them from dropping out. Critical thinking, project work, advanced digital literacy are key when it comes to learning university environment. Up2U is committed to bridging the gap between higher education and research and secondary schools.Commercial Partners (Content Providers)
Up2U community can provide a platform for commercial partners who would like to promote their products for our stakeholders.EC Projects
Digital Learning is one of the key issues that the Horizon2020 programme wants to address. Up2U welcomes other EC projects that are aiming at facilitating, implementing and integrating digital learning tools and services into the learning environment. Our community embraces like-minded projects and project communities to explore and explore the possible synergies.Governments and Decision Makers
Up2U intends to share its findings and best practices that might be collected during the project and even after, once a community is established. Our input can be implemented in future policy making procedures and our experts are willing to give their professional opinion on topics related to the project’s scope.Projects
