The Startup Project aims to promote entrepreneurial education through an innovative online platform that utilizes Open Educational Resources (OER) for personalized training. It targets educators and learners to foster skills necessary for entrepreneurship in the face of high unemployment rates, especially among youth. The project includes components for assessing learning needs, peer review, and resource recommendations to enhance the effectiveness and accessibility of entrepreneurial training.

1. StartUP
The StartUP project in a nutshell
Francesco FEDELE
Sophia R&I
V Jornadas eMadrid – Session “Emprendimiento y REAs” – 30.06.2015

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

3. 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”

4. 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.

5. 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 )

6. 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

7. 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

8. Partners

9. 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

10. 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 “

11. 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.

12. OER Barriers to take up
Several 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

13. How does it work?
• The OER Gateway is
an open learning architecture/platform
Including
• 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

14. How does it work?
Four Components:
•The Virtual Expert
•The Authoring System ( “Share your OER”)
•The Rating System
•The Recommender

15. The Virtual Expert
Conducts a multidimensional user’s Training Needs Assesment
Working on
•personal interests,
•age,
•educational background,
•prior knowledge,
•learning style
According to four compentece clusters, defined through a
Competence Matrix

16. Clusters and entrepreneurial competences

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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)

21. 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.

22. Startup Introductory Video

23. 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

24. A message from the Consortium!
WE NEED PILOT USERS!
Please join the community and
fill in the evaluation form
Thank you in advance!

25. Thank you for your attention
Any questions?
???????

26. Thank you for your attention!
Contacts
www.startupproject.eu
Francesco 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