The STELLAR project has been commended in its first annual performance evaluation by the European Commission for starting so strongly in its goal of strengthening scientific and technological excellence in Technology-Enhanced Learning.
A panel of four international experts, from the US, China, Norway, and the UK, chaired by the EC project officer Marco Marsella assessed the project recently in Luxembourg, and indicated that it has built good foundations for de-fragmenting Technology-Enhanced Learning in Europe. In year one, STELLAR has particularly emphasized the definition of a first round of “Grand Challenges” for research in the TEL field. The STELLAR Network consortium consists of 16 outstanding European partner organizations and is managed by Peter Scott (Coordinator), Fridolin Wild (General Manager), and Alan Fletcher (Administrative Manager) of the Open University’s KMi.
As an aside, it is interesting to note that the KMi FM technology was used extensively in the first year of this project work, with over 150 virtual working FM events!
KMi’s FM service (now hosted by the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning) provides a range of good metric tools that help to put some of this work into context. Using “FM Metrics” we can say that this year, using FM virtual meetings alone, STELLAR work saved over 160,000 Kg of CO2 being produced (had these meetings been conducted face-to-face instead of virtually); that the 150 meetings involved over 220 “meeting hours” of work; with 73 ‘active registered participants’ and 140 unregistered meeting ‘guests’. FM Metrics also provide this community, as others, with interesting visualizations of this work. In the example pictured above, we can see a ‘word cloud visualization’ of the topics in the last 10 FM events before this review meeting. Clearly, it is no surprise that the words ‘please’ and ‘sorry’ feature prominently, at that time!
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