StartUP

The StartUP project in a nutshell

Francesco FEDELESophia R&I

V Jornadas eMadrid – Session “Emprendimiento y REAs” – 30.06.2015

Summary

•Project’s Rationale•Project’s Highlights•How does it work?•Areas of improvement •A message from the Consortium!•Questions and answers

Project’s Rationale“Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan”(EC- 2013)

“Entrepreneurship is a powerful driver of economic growth and job creation: it creates

new companies and jobs, opens up new markets, and nurtures new skills and

capabilities”

Project’s Rationale

•The project rationale is based on 3 pillars: ▫promotion of entrepreneurial

education and training; ▫creation of an environment where

entrepreneurs can flourish and grow;

▫the development of models to reach specific groups whose entrepreneurial potential is not being tapped to its fullest extent.

Project’s Rationale

•Unprecedented unemployment rates, especially for the young (NEETs)

•Entrepreneurship is seen as a driver for (self) employment and economic growth

BUT•Ad hoc training is needed

•Traditional training-mostly non formal and informal-is expensive (both and )

StartUp project•PROJECT

▫Intelligent training needs assessment and OER to foster Entrepreneurship

•PROGRAMME▫EU Lifelong Learning Programme, KA3 ICT

•DURATION: 1 Jan 2013 – 30 Aug 2015•AIM

▫Develop an assessment programme and self-directive learning based on OERs to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills

StartUp objectives

•Set up an innovative method for evaluating individual users learning needs in the entrepreneurial sector

•Provide effective OER-based training sets corresponding to the real individual learning needs

•Set up a peer-review and sharing community to ensure the quality of the individual learning path

Partners

Target group(s)• That will benefit from the OER teacher-training course

and produce contents:▫ EDUCATORS:

School Teachers University Teachers VET trainees

• That will benefit from the Expert System & Open Training:▫ LEANERS:

School Students University Students VET trainers Adult learners and professionals, Informal and non-formal learners

Other features

• Multilingual platform• Also meant for

trainers/teachers• Based on OER

• “The possibility of using OERs for training is a practice which should be more commonly used, especially in secondary schools where sometimes learning programs are very much traditional “

OER Definition

•“Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”

By Atkins et al. in “A review of the open educational resources movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities” The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2007.

OER Barriers to take upSeveral factors: •1) lack of institutional support, •2) lack of technological tools for sharing and adapting resources, •3) lack of skills and time of users, •4) lack of quality or fitness of OER, •5) personal issues like lack of trust and time. •Source: “Beyond OER” van der Sluis, Justin, Mirjam van Praag, and Wim Vijverberg. (2005). Entrepreneurship Selection and Performance: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Education in Developing Economies. World Bank Econ Rev 19 (2):225-261

How does it work?• The OER Gateway is

an open learning architecture/platformIncluding• A method for evaluating the learning needs of

individual users• an innovative-online peer review community

ensuring the quality of the OER made available by the system

How does it work?

Four Components:•The Virtual Expert •The Authoring System ( “Share your OER”) •The Rating System •The Recommender

The Virtual Expert

Conducts a multidimensional user’s Training Needs AssesmentWorking on•personal interests, •age, •educational background, •prior knowledge, •learning styleAccording to four compentece clusters, defined through a Competence Matrix

Clusters and entrepreneurial competences

The Virtual Expert

Output: •a set of recommended resources to fulfil the identified training needs and the acquisition of new competences, creating an OER-based personalized training set.

The Authoring System

“Share your OER” •Users can participate in the improvement and customization of the training sets, by:

▫ developing an OER from scratch, ▫ adapt or remix an existing OER both in terms of contents

and format,▫ translate an OER, ▫ localize an existing OER ▫ link it into the system.

The Rating System

Allows collaborative and peer-to-peer learning and assessment of resources. •An online community is set to promote discussion and collect feedback on the quality of the training sets. •Assessing:

▫ “Quality”: how users access and navigate into the interface, its layout, and the quality of contents (e.g. clear, well explained and presented, without spelling errors).

▫ “Relevance”: the relevance to the training set proposed.

The Recommender

•Provides users with more resources than the OERs selected for the training set.

•Helps discovering new resources with the Serendipity search tool, using such resources as basis for new OERs,

• it helps networking through the suggestion of Twitter accounts and hashtags (analysis of keywords)

Areas of improvement

We have run a number of enquiries on pilot users•Main outputs•the online interface should be more user-friendly and endearing to users, •the clusters of competences should be amplified in other directions or sectors, •an enhanced Virtual Expert is desirable, •the possibility to do simultaneous training in different clusters should be introduced, •and so on.

Startup Introductory Video

Next steps

Pilot:▫ Open Community Test: July – August 2015

•Enrich the system with entrepreneurial-related open contents•Explore the transferability of the system in other domains

A message from the Consortium!

WE NEED PILOT USERS!Please join the community and fill in the evaluation

formThank you in advance!

Thank you for your attentionAny questions?

???????

Thank you for your attention!

Contacts

www.startupproject.euFrancesco FEDELE, SOPHIA R&I, Italy

f.fedele@sophiari.eu

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein