COSMOS: An Advanced Scientific Repository for Science Teaching and Learning
Project description
The COSMOS project is a pan-European initiative co-funded by the European Commission under the eContentPlus programme. The aim of the COSMOS project is to use existing digital educational content related to astronomy and physics and make it more usable and accessible for end-users. This will be achieved through the COSMOS Portal, a service employing bleeding-edge metadata technologies to offer users significant versatility in retrieving the information they need.
Why does it matter
The main purpose of the COSMOS project is to create an experimental laboratory for students and teachers in order to improve science instruction by expanding the resources for teaching and learning in schools and universities and by providing more challenging and authentic learning experiences for students.
Partners and funding sources
Funding Source:
COSMOS project is funded under the eContentplus programme, a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.
Partners:
International Environment and Quality Services S.A., Greece
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece
Växjö University, Sweden
Foundation for Research and Technology, Greece
Shumen University, Bulgaria
National Technical University of Athens, Greece
University of Bayreuth, Germany
European Physical Society, France
Education Highway, Austria
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, Austria
City of Helsinki, Education Department, Finland
BG Schwechat, Austria
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
HEUREKA, Finland
Results
The specific objectives of COSMOS are:
- To offer unified access to high quality digital educational content related to physics and astronomy. To that end, we will use two major existing repositories, the Discovery Space Portal and the Educational Repository of the Schools Observatory Project. These repositories include thousands of educational projects, activities, lesson plans, astronomical images and scientific data, videos and simulations of physical phenomena.
- To implement a set of tools (COSMOS Toolbox) for enriching educational content with relevant metadata and for designing new Learning Activities.
- To validate the COSMOS Portal service in real-world environments throughout Europe (Greece, Austria, Germany, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Finland and Sweden) at high school and university level.
- To formulate a recommendation for a European Quality Certification for Science Education Content.
Methodology
Next steps
Publications
