support participants to develop inquiry skills for responsible research and innovation for envisioning and contributing to improvements in their cities.

Several initiatives on collaborative inquiry-based learning – “co-inquiry” –  have been emerging in Higher Education and Secondary schools. Most of them are funded by local governments and the European Commission. The urban inquiry project  is an example, which is based on various initiatives.

Urban Inquiry offers open educational resources, learning technologies and pedagogical approaches for formal education curriculum and informal learning opportunities promoted by universities, schools, science centres, museums, CSO and citizens associations.

Our aim focuses on supporting educators, researchers and learners to identify authentic scenarios, describe collective problems scientifically and apply open science tools for socio-scientific knowledge construction.

Links

http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/urban-inquiries/

Online Learning and Fun is a  large-scale research project  whose  aims is to examine learners’ views about fun in learning supported by technologies in Higher Education. Due to the COVID-19 virus pandemic, many schools and universities  have adapted their curriculum to promote online learning. Consequently, understanding factors that influence learners’ engagement and enjoyment with online studies has been foregrounded for many educators, and their students, for the first time. In this new context, being responsive to students’ views about their learning and fun is an important part of developing online pedagogies that might support learner well-being. (Okada, 2020). Objectives OLAF  project  has three objectives:

1. to refine a self-reflective instrument for  generating a large database;

2. to cocreate a set of recommendations for innovating pedagogical practices;

3. to increase the number of research studies about fun in learning for promoting changes in the educational curriculum, practices and policies.

It is coordinated by Dr. Okada (PI) and Prof. Sheehy (Co-I)

Methodology

This mixed method study will  refine a self-reflective instrument about fun and online learning on both contexts:  formal education and non-formal education, which will be useful for developing institutional, inter-institutional and cross-national studies during the pandemic. This instrument was designed to increase students’ awareness about their epistemic beliefs, engagement with online learning, and views about fun in distance education.

Our findings will be used to provide recommendations to teaching staff, curriculum designers and project teams to support students’ enjoyment with learning enhanced by technologies. Our purpose is also to create opportunities for research groups to  investigate new strategies to enrich online learning experiences in various contexts supported by innovative pedagogies, such as gamification, virtual and augmented reality, 360-annotation, story-animation, datification, inquiry mapping and open schooling projects.

We are using a self-reflective instrument to generate data with:

Our study was approved by The Open University’s Human Research Ethics Committee and the project approval ID is HREC/3463.

Previous studies

This instrument was previously applied to a study within an Open University module with 4500 students; 630 participants; 551 respondents.  Findings  indicated that 91% of participants valued fun in online learning; highlighting well-being, motivation and performance. However, 17% believed that fun within learning could take the focus off their studies and result in distraction.

Funder

The Open University

Partners

offers Adopting Standards for European Educational Content. It is an eContentPlus action of the EU focused around standards for interoperability for sharing learning materials.

There are many standards in the field of learning: around objects, around syndication and search, and even to help define the key features of portfolios and assessment.

iCoper is building a reference model to help to bring these standards together and capture the best practice of our diverse community in the use of these standards – to make better learning! There are few standards which help learning institutions (and now learners themselves, perhaps) to create content that is then more easily reused by others, or in different learning context.

The work discussed here is focused on capturing the best practices of our community to support Content Development and Reuse (CDfR).

Participant(s): Alexandra Okada, Teresa Connolly, Peter Scott

Links:

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/name/icoper

stands for “Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training” and is a project co-funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus Programme.

The project started in September 2009 and has a duration of three years.

OpenScout aims at providing an education service in the internet that enables users to easily find, access, use and exchange open content for management education and training.

The management education market is largely diversified, training topics range from general management and leadership to very specific issues like managing risks in banking industry. Despite the resulting growing need for management education and content the potential of already existing open learning materials is hardly exploited, neither in the business sector nor in SMEs where the need for lifelong learning is even greater.

To reduce the usage barriers OpenScout plans to offer easy-to-use skill-based federated search and retrieval web services, provide an openly accessible tool library for improvement and re-publishing of open contents and establish an open user community that opens up their content and adopts OpenScout web services in real contexts of use.

OpenScout will be used by learners directly but also by training and education institutions that search for learning content to be integrated into their learning offerings.

Participant(s): Alexander Mikroyannidis, Alexandra Okada, Teresa Connolly, Suzanne Little, Izabel Meister, Peter Scott

is a network to explore the potential of argument analysis experiments on the net.

Our objectives are to:

(i) investigate how complex debates of topical interest can be more effectively communicated, navigated and analysed when mapped in software tools;

(ii) advance the state of the art in practical argumentation support tools;

(iii) evaluate the software tools analytically and empirically.

Players participate in Argumentation Experiments, working to an agreed schedule and from common sources. Through systematic comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of approaches, we aim to clarify how approaches can be improved.

Participant(s):Simon Buckingham Shum, Alexandra Okada

is about Equipping the Next Generation for Active Engagement in Science and to promote more Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). It focuses on secondary schools and teachers’ professional development. Its aim is to engage educators and learners to participate actively in socio-scientific issues and innovate Science Education.

Traditionally students gain an image of science as a body of content, whereas RRI deals with uncertain areas of knowledge, where values and argument matter as much as facts. This shift is hugely challenging.

ENGAGE is part of the EU Science with and for society agenda. It focuses on a more inquiry-based methodology, which gives students opportunity for self-expression and responsibility for coming to informed decisions.

Partners

Link: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/name/engage

is a project about Inclusive Open Schooling through Engaging and Future-oriented Science. It is a sustainable model for enabling more secondary schools to adopt open schooling by embedding science-action in the core curriculum through fun participatory approaches.

A science-action makes science more relevant to students by showing them how scientific research and innovation can affect their lives, and how they can use science to make a positive impact.  Partnerships between schools, families, universities and enterprises will be established to increase students’ interest and confidence with science in life.

Context

Our age is profoundly shaped by science and technology innovations.  Societies must become more scientifically literate to be able to make evidence-based decisions and sustain themselves in our highly competitive world. One solution that has been proposed for increasing students’ aspirations in science is to open up school through partnerships and family involvement.

Science education needs to make students more scientifically literate and encourage larger numbers to take up science careers. Open schooling approaches can make science more authentic but tend to be adopted only as extra-curricular activities, in a minority of schools or are limited to gifted and talented students.

Research Questions

To make open schooling inclusive and widespread in science education, we believe 3 research questions need to be addressed: Q1. How can open schooling increase the value and priority of partnership activities and reduce the barriers to entry so more schools are willing and able to adopt them ? Q2. How can open schooling facilitate the interaction between all partners (science professionals, teachers, students and their families) to result in effective learning experiences linked to Research and Innovation? Q3. How can open schooling make science careers more inclusive by giving disadvantaged students more experience and insight into professional STEM jobs, supported by professionals and their families?

Methodology

CONNECT targets learners who lack science capital, making them more confident with using science, giving them contact with science professionals and engaging family members to improve their attitudes towards science careers.

CONNECT outcomes are to facilitate partnership interactions for productive learning linked to R&I, maximise the value of partnerships and reduce barriers to entry, and make science careers more inclusive for disadvantaged learners.

To achieve these, there are 5 outputs:

1. a structured partnership system to give partners a step-by-step process to follow, with induction and coaching

2. a partners-projects database to provide participants with information and best practice guidance about partnership options

3. a Care-Know-Do framework for embedding a science-action within a science topics

4. Customizable project resources about future orientated scenarios

5. Partnership policies for schools, universities and enterprises.

CONNECT is coordinated by Dr  Okada (PI and Scientific Leader); Prof.  Oates (coordinator of WP8 Ethics), Prof. Whitelock and Edwards ( coordinators of WP7  Evaluation with Implementation in the UK).

CONNECT will create partnerships in Europe , Africa and South America  including 1,000 teachers and 500 science professionals. It will spread to new organisations by establishing a persuasive evidence base and disseminate science-actions globally.

Previous projects

weSPOT – Working Environment with Social Personal and Open technologies (2013 – 2015)

ENGAGE – Engaging the next generation for active engagement in Science (2014 – 2020)

Funder

European Commission. Grant Agreement ID: 872814

Partners

• Greece EXUS SOFTWARE MONOPROSOPI ETAIRIA PERIORISMENIS EVTHINIS PERIFERIAKI DIEFTHINSI PROTOVATHMIAS KAI DEFTEROVATHMIAS EKPAIDEFSIS KRITIS

• UK THE OPEN UNIVERSITY MASTERY SCIENCE LTD

• Spain FUNDACIO PRIVADA INSTITUT DE RECERCA DE LA SIDA-CAIXA

• Romania UNIVERSITATEA VALAHIA TARGOVISTE

• Brazil UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DA BAHIA ASSOCIACAO PARANAENSE DE CULTURA APC

• Denmark FONDEN TEKNOLOGIRADET

• Portugal GLOBAZ, S.A.

is a Network of Excellence Professional Learning whose aim is to expand professional learners engagement with the best of European Interactive Media Research.

PROLEARN investigates and advances issues especially relevant for professional training in SME’s and larger companies, including brokerage platforms and services, business models for specific markets, and advanced eLearning and knowledge work management arrangements.

Corporate training still needs effective competence mapping and performance evaluation tools to support business learners. Indeed, corporate clients actually need the same access as all learners to an ideal portal learning system: ie. that will offer them a tracked experience with a set of 10 Euro learning modules, complete with credits and real interaction with peers, tutors and content; anywhere, anytime.

PROLEARN includes awards, best practice examples, show cases and workshops to advance European professional training in technology enhanced environments. Through roadmaps and policy guides, future trends will be analysed and charted to promote future professional training tools, environments and scenarios.

More Information

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/507310

https://www.prolearn-project.org/

is an Adaptive Trust-based e-assessment system for learning.

With teaching and learning increasingly being delivered online, there is a growing need for robust and trustworthy online assessments. For this reason, The Open University (OU) is part of the EU H2020-funded TeSLA project, which aims to develop an e-assessment authentication system to help ensure that learners in online assessments are who they say they are. TeSLA is developing a suite of tools to automatically and robustly authenticate student authorship in high-stakes e-assessments.

TeSLA will be of benefit to any university that wishes to authenticate students taking e-assessments (including OU). It aims to be able to support any existing e-assessment model (diagnostic, formative, and summative), and will address related pedagogical, ethical, legal and technological issues. The system will be useful for fully online and blended learning, and will mean that students can avoid having to attend a face-to-face examination but will still be able to trust their assessment results. TeSLA will offer to educational institutions, accrediting agencies, and to society in general, an unambiguous proof of a learner’s academic progression and achievements.

To date, TeSLA has undertaken the following activities:

• Analysing and designing the most appropriate learning activities for e-assessment taking into account both, academic requirements to ensure the learning process and the adaptation to a fully online and cross-curricular assessment.

• Improving the e-assessment process by introducing tools and resources in the learning activities that capture learners’ data to ensure their authentication and authorship

• Conducting several pilots of the TeSLA e-assessment system that guarantee the equality of opportunity and respect for diversity in real teaching and learning scenarios, while ensuring the authentication and authorship of the learners during the e-assessment processes.

• Providing a core version of the TeSLA e-assessment system free of charge for educational institutions, in order to improve their e-assessment processes.

• Providing guidelines and learning resources for teachers to show how the TeSLA e-assessment system can be used for enhancing e-assessment processes

Team:

Links:

https://iet.open.ac.uk/projects/tesla

The Open App project is an initiative of Rumpus Centre. It focuses on Open Educational Resources (OER) to be designed by youth based on ‘open schooling’ approach to foster skills for Responsible Research and Innovation.

It is funded by Brazil government and supported by 360 in 360 Immersive Experiences (2018-2019). These OER for mobile devices about topical socio-scientific issues can be used, openly and freely, in formal and non-formal settings to enhance students and citizens’ immersive learning with fun and engagement.

Our studies suggest that Virtual Reality (VR) can transform the way educational content is delivered making it easy to immerse learners in time and space with real-life settings relevant for society.

It is led by Dr. Alexandra Okada with a group of partners in the UK and Brazil (Sangar Zucchi, Simone Fuchtler and Karine, Rocha).