Abstract:

Education has evolved through times from a family-based model to a school-based model where children focus on learning important subjects in an organized and coherent way.
More than ever, education has a key role in society. It is through education that children acquire the knowledge to meet basic needs and young people acquire the knowledge that prepares them to add value to society. It is through education that society hopes to develop by creating more skilled people able to innovate and evolve.
In a globalized world where societies compete against each other in a market logic, is through education and consequent innovation that they can make difference. Thus, any new approach that leads to a better and more efficient educational process is a valuable feature for any modern society.
Looking at the contemporary school-based approach to education one can see that societies usually divide education in different building blocks, primary education where children acquire basic knowledge, secondary education where this knowledge is more clearly divided in subjects and further detailed and finally higher education where students specialize in given area of knowledge and become prepared to make valuable contributions to that area.
Due to the nature of secondary schools and higher education institutions, there is sometimes a considerable gap in between that makes more difficult the transition of students between both levels. This is due not only to admission policies but also to the different methodologies that are used.
In this paper, we detail our work in the European Project Up2U whose goal is to bridge the gap between secondary schools and universities. We start by presenting an overview of education in secondary schools in Portugal looking at its different areas and focusing on Science and Humanities which is the principal area for preparing students to access the University. We explain how this area is organized in branches and present some official statistics about the success. Finally, we propose a technological approach to close the gap between the secondary school and the University which we will apply to the Science and Humanities area and will hopefully increase the success in terms of number of students completing the secondary school and being accepted to the University. We agreed to work with several secondary schools to test our approach and achieve our goals.

Keywords:

Distributed learning, Education, Technology, Formal and Informal Learning, Up2U