Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece (EA)

Ellinogermaniki Agogi (EA) is a private educational organization officially recognized by the Greek state. It is an institutional member of EDEN (European Distance Education Network), of STEDE (Science Teacher Education Development in Europe) network and of ECSITE (European Network of Science Centres and Museums) network. EA was the first Greek educational organization, which applied Open Distance Learning in secondary level education in the year of 1993. Since 1998, the organization has established a devoted department, the Research and Development (R&D) Department for the design, development and implementation of the research activities in education, expanding the collaboration with Universities and pedagogical Institutions across Europe. The R&D Department acts as interface between the pedagogical research, the technological innovation and the school community. The work of the R&D department which currently employs 18 full time researchers (10 with PhD, 8 at MSc level) focuses on the following areas: a) the development of methodologies and empirical research to investigate processes of learning and knowledge acquisition in various subject-matter areas (physics, mathematics, biology, history, etc); b) the collaboration with computer science departments and artificial intelligence labs for the development of computational models and AI learning systems; c) the collaboration with Universities and private companies for the development and testing of educational software; and d) the design of technology supported learning environments. During the last years the R&D department has coordinated and supported the participation of EA in more than 100 European (eContentPlus, ICT-PSP, SiS and e-Infrastructures in FP7; ICT in FP6; IST in FP5; LLP-ACT, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci) and National projects. In most of them, the main role of the research group is the design of technology-enhanced educational and learning activities, development of innovative teaching methodologies and practices in science education, the implementation of the proposed activities in real school environments at national and international level, the organisation of international summer courses for science teacher trainings. EA is the leading partner for the implementation in schools the largescale FP7 projects “Inspiring Science Education”, “Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School”, “Ark of Inquiry:Inquiry Awards for Youth over Europe” which involve thousands of secondary education schools from various countries around Europe.