GOVERNMENTAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AG

The rurALLURE action aims to leverage the state-of-the-art in information technologies in order to promote rural museums and heritage sites in the vicinity of major European pilgrimage routes. The goal is to foster symbiosis between the rural environment and the pilgrimage routes, so that the ongoing investment in the latter permeates to the nearby rural areas and, the other way round, the cultural experience of the pilgrimage is enriched by the vast cultural heritage that most often goes unnoticed. rurALLURE will connect cultural heritage collections and venues to present Europe’s cultural heritage in the wider historical and geographical context, leveraging the role of museums in preserving and managing cultural heritage, and collaborating with national and transnational associations to develop and promote cultural tourism. It will also foster sustained cooperation between museums and heritage sites to increase European public interest, cultural tourism and the innovation potentials of these institutions for heritage sciences and the cultural and creative sectors. Finally, it will conduct work to identifying gaps and obstacles, as well as best practices and fields where research and innovation can develop new solutions for successful cooperation.

In the last decade, a number of initiatives were crucial for enabling high-quality research - by providing e-Infrastructure resources, application support and training - in both South East Europe (SEE) and Eastern Mediterranean (EM). They helped reduce the digital divide and brain drain in Europe, by ensuring access to regional e-Infrastructures to new member states, states on path to ascension, and states in European Neighborhood Policy area – in total 14 countries in SEE and 6 in EM. This VI-SEEM proposal brings together these e-Infrastructures to build capacity and better utilize synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the inter-disciplinary scientific user communities in the combined SEE and EM regions (SEEM). The overall objective is to provide user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for regional cross-border Scientific Communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEEM region; by linking compute, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, models, software and tools. This VRE will provide the scientists and researchers with the support in full lifecycle of collaborative research: accessing and sharing relevant research data, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing new knowledge and data - which can be stored and shared in the same VRE. Climatology and Life Science communities are directly relevant for Societal Challenges. The driving ambition of this proposal is to maintain leadership in enabling e-Infrastructure based research and innovation in the region for the 3 strategic regional user communities: supporting multidisciplinary solutions, advancing their research, and bridging the development gap with the rest of Europe. The VI-SEEM consortium brings together e-Infrastructure operators and Scientific Communities in a common endeavor.

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.