European Commission’s FORGE project (Forging Online Education through FIRE) has launched an open call for the development of experiment-driven courses that run on Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) infrastructure. The call is addressed to researchers, academics, students, laboratories and SMEs and the FORGE consortium solicits proposals for the development or use of innovative interactive courses, using the project’s toolbox and real world-class infrastructure on FIRE facilities.
FORGE brings the FIRE and eLearning worlds together, by providing the tools to enrich online learning with experimentation possibilities. The project specifies development methodologies and best practices for offering FIRE experimentation facilities to learners and to the learning community in general. Within the open FORGE community and ecosystem educational resources, collaborative tools and proposed experiments are offered and contributed for free.
Indicatively, the types of proposals that can be submitted within the Open Call include:
- Transformation of a traditional course to an experiment-driven course;
- Design and development of a new lab course;
- Creation of interactive educational material and integration into an eBook;
- Development of new widgets and/or FIRE Adapters to enable interconnection of the courses with FIRE facilities.
Participants are entitled to free access to the FORGE tools and processes and guaranteed support by the FORGE consortium, covering guided training and technical assistance. Moreover, the Greek Research and Education Network (GRNET), being a member of the FORGE consortium, offers free access to ~okeanos, its in-house developed IaaS cloud computing facility.
The Open Call is launched as continuous open access to the FORGE tools, meaning that no strict procedures for proposal submission and evaluation will be applied and is organized into consecutive phases of submission and implementation of proposals. The call is currently in its second phase and the submission cut-off date is Monday, June 15, 2015.
Participants will be able to submit their proposals at any time. However, proposals submitted after the cut-off dates of the consecutive submission phases will be taken into account for the next round of proposals submission and implementation.
The call constitutes an exceptional opportunity for the European Research and Education community to experiment to state of the art real infrastructure and high-performance testbed facilities, at no cost. Thus researchers, teachers and students have the opportunity to expand the outreach of their technological achievements and promote their scientific work and technological achievements within the Pan-European Research and Education community. At the same time, educators are offered the chance to enhance the teaching experience and improve the students’ learning experience.
The FIRE initiative creates an open research environment which facilitates strategic research and development of new Future Internet concepts, giving researchers the tools they need to conduct large-scale experiments on new paradigms.
Detailed information about the Open Call is available at the FORGE website:
ict-forge.eu/opencall
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 610889.
