Up to University (Up2U)

Projektziele

The main goal of Up2U is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and higher education and 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 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. The project’s 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.

In order to achieve its main goal, Up2U will fulfil the following set of specific objectives:

1. To assess the use of public and private cloud-based infrastructure services with proven track records in higher education and research, integrating and adapting them to the specific learning context of schools.
2. To design and develop a scalable and flexible integrated “application toolbox”, which supports student-driven, personalised, dynamic learning path creation with social sharing and interactions (i.e. project-based and peer-to-peer learning and assessment) on top of the abovementioned cloud-based service infrastructure.
3. To build and train the learning community for the specific learning context and to facilitate the development of the critical thinking by students and tutoring role of teachers that are essential in an informal learning environment.
4. To propose an executable roadmap for ensuring security and privacy. Specifically, the project will address filtering of network traffic at schools, handling of intellectual property rights, copyright materials, student identity, and the right to choose data storage locations.
5. To roll out and test the infrastructure service components and the application toolbox through very large-scale pilots in at least 8 European countries (Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Spain) to identify strategies for scaling and achieving bigger impacts.
6. To develop, establish and operate a continuous risk assessment function during the entire lifetime of the project and to liaise with other related projects and initiatives.
7. To define an effective sustainability and exploitation framework based on GÉANT’s NREN community, their existing customer base, SME partners and connected schools in order to mainstream learning solutions for secondary education that are proven in higher education and research contexts.

GWDG’s Role in the Project

The GWDG is leader of the work package “sustainability and exploitation of results”, which aims to achieve true sustainability of always-on education. The GWDG is going to collaborate mostly in the following tasks:

• Put a public and private cloud-based infrastructure in place to be used by schools in several pilot countries
• Ensure that all the tools and services the project is going to use and/or make available are sustainable after the lifetime of the project
• Define business plans and investigate appropriate business models using the expertise of the commercial and NREN partners and their contacts with third-party business actors
• Facilitate new schools to join the Up2U infrastructure and ecosystem that will form a federated market-place for the learning community
• Help, monitor and coordinate the pilot schools in Germany
• Exploit the results of the project

Projektpartner

Up2U gathers 18 partners from 12 countries across Europe and Israel, including: National Research and Education Networks, traditional and open universities, infrastructure providers and commercial partners.

Coordinator: GEANT Association, The Netherlands

7 National Research and Education Networks

• Consortium GARR, Italy
• GRNET - Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., Greece
• FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Portugal
• IUCC - Inter-University Computation Center, Israel
• KIFÜ Kormányzati Informatikai Fjleszt’tsi Ügynökség (State Information Technology Development Agency), Hungary
• PSNC - Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Polskiej Nauk, Poland
• LITNET network department in KTU (Lithuania)

7 Universities

• OU - The Open University, UK
• UROMA - Universita Degli Studi di Roma la Sapienza, Italy
• NTUA - National Technical University of Athens, Greece
• UVIGO - Universidad de Vigo, Spain
• ISEP - Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal
• TAU - Tel Aviv University, Israel
• KTU - Kauno Technologijos Universitetas, Lithuania

2 Infrastructure Providers

• CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland
• GWDG, Germany

2 Enterprises

• TELTEK Video Research SL, Spain
• OwnCloud GmbH, Germany

Additional Information

• Up2U Project Wiki
• Up2U Repositories GitHub, Docker Hub