Abstract:

The project “Up to University” (Up2U) funded by EU programme Horizon 2020 aims 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 faced in universities. Project consortium is developing Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) for Schools - an innovative ecosystem that facilitates more open, effective and efficient co-design, co-creation and use of digital content, tools and services adapted for personalized, collaborative or experimental learning by students preparing for university. Created platform and services are tested in the large-scale pilot activities across the Europe. Development of national Up2U infrastructure for Lithuania is implemented by Kaunas University of Technology and Lithuanian Research and Education Network LITNET. To leverage Up2U national infrastructure an online CPD program for teachers was designed with the aim to provide with opportunity to all interested educators to learn how to use developed services regardless of living place and at more flexible time schedule. First iteration of CPD Module 1 attracted 166 participants from 102 schools and proved to be successful with completion rate of 62%. A lot of interesting data has been gathered during this first iteration of CPD with more than 1,4K posts created in discussion forums and ~4K statements on average created daily in the Learning Record Store. Every active participant spent 15 min. on average during one visit and made 21 actions per visit. Different methods and tools are employed and tested for statistics and learning analytics data gathering. Those endeavors are aimed at analyzing pilot data and at creating solutions that would be useful to ordinary teachers and school administrators. Work is still in progress but some insights are already available and will be presented at the EDULEARN conference.

Keywords:

Online learning, cloud infrastructure, learning analytics, Up2University, NGDLE.