<< Background >>During the period of COVID-19, in spring 2020, schools moved from face-to-face to online teaching and learning to support the continuation of the education. Teachers and students had a new experience of education. In nine European countries the Up2U ecosystem developed in the Horizon 2020 “Up2U” project (“Up to University – Bridging the Gap between Schools and Universities through Informal Education”) was used to support digital learning with successful results and positive feedback from both students and teachers. Although the Up2U project was not directly focussed on formal education, the developed Up2U platform helped many teachers to meet the challenges of distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic.This project focuses on school education for students from 13 years old, i.e. education in secondary or vocational schools in most countries. Involving the networks of high schools already activated during the Up2U project, and extending the community with new schools, partners will analyse and test the efficacy of tools and pedagogical approaches, and will provide training activities for teachers.The project will build on top of the Horizon 2020 Up2U project that has piloted its methodology and its learning platform with selected teachers from hundreds of schools from several European countries. The Up2U finished in 2020, and reported a positive impact on teachers but also identified their further needs.These needs and challenges are the following:- Difficulty in adapting the digital tools to rigidly-defined curricula.- Feasibility to adapt teachers’ existing learning materials to the modern technology.- Feasibility to track progress of learners in distance learning.- Teachers being afraid of possible technical problems that they would be unable to solve on their own.- No support for teachers from their school, i.e. teachers spending significant effort after classes to test new tools and to adapt them into their courses.This Up2DigiSchool project will adopt that methodology and the technical solutions, will update it to the current circumstances and to newly-recognised teachers’ needs, and will extend the previous target schools base to make a positive impact on more teachers of Europe. Starting from the already-recognised needs and existing solutions, the Up2DigiSchool project ensures it will efficiently address the real challenges of the target groups.<< Objectives >>The project aims at improving the current situation in digital education in Europe. The following concrete outcomes and objectives are aimed for:- Schools to be better prepared for developing digital skills and competences at students- Schools to be better prepared for the ongoing digital transformation, for circumstances such as pandemic, but also for regular day-to-day learning leveraging digital tools more effectively- Teachers to be prepared and more confident in adopting innovative teaching practices based on digital tools- Community of educators to exchange learning scenarios and benefitting further from international collaboration- The free open-source Up2U platform to be extended with new features and services<< Implementation >>The project targets teachers of students from 13 years old, i.e. mainly in secondary and vocational schools, but also school leaders and other teaching professions. Based on known needs recognized in the previous project and on existing solutions that address the needs, this project will create several results that will directly help those target groups in reaching the aforementioned objectives:- Extended and up-to-date digital tools corresponding to evolving needs of schools- Professional teacher training program, validated in pilots, and adopted to national languages and circumstances- Self-paced course ‘Approaches to Digital Learning’ as an open learning opportunity promoting the teaching practicesThese project results will be validated in large-scale pilots in five European countries: Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, and Poland. We will start from the existing communities of the former Up2U project and extend them in each of the participating countries. Feedback and conclusions gained through the pilots will be adopted to continuously improve the results within the project’s lifetime.The project will also organize seven multiplier events in participating countries to disseminate its results, to extend its community with new stakeholders, and to gain valuable feedback for improvement of the results and for further project implementation.<< Results >>The project will carry out six project results (PRs), which together lead to the project’s objectives. Comparative Analysis of the used digital tools (PR1) will allow to update the already identified teachers’ needs that should be addressed by other project results.Learning Scenarios Repository integrated with the Up2U Learning Platform (PR2) will help teachers to share Learning Scenarios and learn from each other how to use the Up2U learning platform better.Extended Learning Platform (PR3) will provide new functionality, especially to better track learners’ progress in distance learning, but also based on the pilot feedback. Through the continuous improvements, the project will be providing constant support to users.Teacher training program “Digital School Ready Educator” (PR4) and Self-Paced MOOC on “Approaches to Digital Learning” (PR5) will ensure teachers digital skills development and easier engagement of new teachers as well as support to already existing ones.Finally, Results and feedback analysis based on execution of the teacher training program (PR6) will validate the aforementioned project results with the project’s target groups and bring necessary feedback for continuous improvement of those results.Through these results, targeted teachers will be provided with the free and open learning platform, training materials, and continuous support for their learning activities.

The MAGIC Project seeks to establish a set of agreements for Europe, Latin America and other participating World Regions, aiming at consolidating and completing the building blocks of middleware necessary for the establishment of a marketplace of services and real-time applications for international and inter-continental research groups which facilitates mobility and the work of global science communities. More specifically, the project specific goals are: -To foster the deployment of the platforms that enable mobility of people and seamless access to services by promoting the establishment of identity federations interconnected via eduGAIN, creating awareness of privacy and security issues and spreading eduroam by: sharing experiences, carrying out training and making available shared infrastructure to ease the process in the partner world regions. -To develop a model for inter-operation between NREN cloud application markets of participating world regions, based on cloud provisioning and taking advantage of applications developed and run by NRENs across different continents to create a model for a worldwide application market for collaboration tools and services -To seek consensus among participating world regions on the importance of interoperability of real-time applications and work towards the adoption of standards such as those proposed by the Global CEO Forum to promote the creation of a worldwide environment for these applications. -To foster the collaborative work of Global Science Communities by actively promoting the participation of Latin American and other regions’ researchers in European Commission Calls and those of other international funding agencies with high impact in the participating regions and other networking activities.

EOSC Gravity will support the transition of the European co-programmed Partnership for EOSC into its new governance and funding framework. EOSC Gravity will leverage EOSC Focus engagement channels and facilities and establish new ones. Through open calls, EOSC Gravity will provide funding to support the EOSC Federation by encouraging the creation of EOSC Nodes, inter-project collaboration, and will support the revision of SRIA 2.0. The further evolution of the EOSC Federation will be charted through measures to monitor and report on EOSC Partnership KPIs and to establish a methodology to assess the impact of EOSC. What: EOSC Gravity will support the Partnership in its role of charting a continuous flow of up-to-date and accurate information on the status of EOSC and developing strategic recommendations through the SRIA to ensure that the Partnership transitions into a new governance and funding model post-2027. HOW: EOSC Gravity will mobilise and grow the broader EOSC community with outreach and engagement activities empowering stakeholders to further evolve the EOSC Federation; and will directly fund actions to support the creation of several EOSC Nodes. The EOSC Academy will be anchored to ensure an informed community has the expertise to foster EOSC-related activities at country and institution levels. Projects will collaborate and will feed their results into EOSC-A Task Forces. WHY: EOSC Gravity will pull the EOSC communities of stakeholders together to contribute to a smooth and effective transition from the Partnership to a new governance and funding framework for EOSC post-2027. Multi-stakeholder collaboration and dialogue which builds on EU and national investments in this area is needed for the future of EOSC as a federated infrastructure. WHO: The EOSC Gravity consortium is formulated as a lean grouping of skilled partners coordinated by EOSC-A, the EC’s partner in the EOSC Partnership and current coordinator of the EOSC Focus project.

As one of the first in a series of projects foreseen under GN5-FPA, GN5-1 aims to provide faster, more resilient and secure connectivity infrastructure and collaboration services to enable researchers and students’ access to applications that support evidence-based and effective collaboration across virtual research teams, worldwide. GN5-1 will continue the development of state-of-the art, cost-effective, secure and resilient connectivity to provide unconstrained capacity ahead of demand in the backbone network and NREN access in multiples of 100Gbps, delivering Terabit connectivity where needed. GN5-1 will prototype, pilot and, where appropriate, procure new online above-the-net services and deliver pervasive, innovative and distributed trust and identity infrastructure and services to achieve strategic positioning of T&I services as a key enabler of research and education collaboration within Europe. Trusted access to data sources and services, and authentication and authorisation Infrastructure services, such as eIDAS will also be included. The project will address Horizon Europe’s priorities in areas such as data security and access control, innovation and DNSH, and will expand NRENs' users beyond traditional scientific and research communities, enabling networking and access to the common European data spaces. GN5-1 will ensure access for researchers and students to the valued services required for Open Science, it will disseminate learning and training, and build community as well as align with EU policies and ongoing participation with standardisation bodies. GN5-1 can offer its distinctive services due to its human network of professionals, in a consortium with a deep understanding of evolving user requirements. Within this community, knowledge and experience is shared between partners to constantly enhance the quality of the services offered, making it an indispensable element of the ERA.

The key objective of our project 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. 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. The learning context from the perspective of the students is the intersection of formal and informal spaces, a dynamic hybrid learning environment where synchronous activities meet in both virtual and real dimensions. For this, we propose to develop an innovative Up to University (Up2U) ecosystem – based on proven experiences in higher education and big research – that facilitates open, more effective and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of digital content, tools and services adapted for personalised learning and teaching of high school students preparing for university. We will address project based learning and peer-to-peer learning scenarios. We strongly believe that all the tools and services the project is going to use and/or make available (i.e. incorporate, design, develop and test) must be sustainable after the lifetime of the project. Therefore, the project is going to develop business plans and investigate appropriate business models using the expertise of the Small Medium Enterprise and National Research and Education Network partners and their contacts with third-party business actors. Our 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.