WP2

Field Research
This workpackage covers the desk research. Research will cover both country/region overviews and also "exemplar" projects - for each project covered, attention will be paid to innovative ICT-based pedagogic approaches that could be replicated.

Activity is oriented to Year 1 with interim reports at the end of the year - but for a fast-moving field where documentation is held on a wiki, it is essential that updating continues throughout Year 2.

Based on partner prior experience, linguistic and country competence, and other factors, a plan was drawn up for the countries and subcontinental regions to be covered, based on relevance to the EU.

In principle, effort is assigned as a country report being tariffed at 10 days and a subcontinental region report at 20 days, with adjustments made for size and complexity of country/region; these tariffs being uplifted by 20% to include the Year 2 rewrite.

Each country report will review the country, its IT situation, its education system (including policy, ministries, funding, and quality), national ICT initiatives and potential exemplars. Subcontinental region reports will aim to summarise at the region level, not always have a section on each country in the region.

Partners will also help other partners with their prior specialist knowledge of countries/regions.

The workpackage does not have to start from scratch. Detailed material is already available on a few countries such as the UK. In addition a scoping exercise was done which located the following general resources:
 * 1) Re.ViCa country reports - many have a section on schools education
 * 2) EUN Insight studies on EU countries (but mostly some years old)
 * 3) OECD country studies (but not much ICT focus)
 * 4) UNESCO Bangkok Country Information on Asia/Oceania
 * 5) infoDev country ICT reports on Africa
 * 6) Demiray handbook of 40 reports on countries in East Europe/West Asia (HE focus)
 * 7) WikiEducator and Wikipedia
 * 8) Material from EU agencies and projects such as LEARNOVATION.

P2 Sero
Overseeing of the field research. Design of country and region templates (and associated notes); and of exemplar templates. Quality control of entries.

Specific studies on countries UK (England and other home nations); Ireland; US; Canada; Brazil; Hispanic America; Anglophone Africa; New Zealand; Commonwealth LAC (Latin America/Caribbean including UK colonies).

Identification of Exemplars.

P1 LRF
Specific studies on countries Greece and Cyprus; the federal country India; and on regions Middle East and North Africa as well as non-Commonwealth Oceania (those countries in Oceania not in the Commonwealth of Nations). A small "float" of days is also held for the Rest of the World (all countries not covered as countries or in regions) in case some become important.

Identification of Exemplars.

P4 ATiT
Specific studies on countries Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia) and Netherlands; Kenya; South Africa; Turkey; Australia; Commonwealth Oceania (those countries in Oceania in the Commonwealth of Nations - such as Samoa and Tonga).

Identification of Exemplars.

P5 MENON
Specific studies on region EU (apart from countries studied separately); Francophone Africa (Sub-Saharan); and East Asia (excluding India); French/Dutch LAC (Latin America and Caribbean - French-speaking and Dutch-speaking countries including Overseas Departments and Territories of France - plus entities within the Kingdom of the Netherlands).

Identification of Exemplars.

P7 EITF
Specific studies on Baltic countries Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia; and on region Eastern Europe (former CIS) and Central Asia (former CIS) - and also Yugosphere (countries of former Yugoslavia - thus not Albania).

Identification of Exemplars.

P8 Tensta
Specific study on country Sweden; and adding "local nuances" to reports on other countries where there are students originally from such countries in Tensta Gymnasium.

Identification of Exemplars.

P9 Aarhus
Specific studies on countries Denmark and Norway.

Identification of Exemplars.

P10 EITF
Specific study on country Finland. Advice to other partners' country/region reports based on prior international experience (outside Europe) - in particular for East Asia and for Nordic Council and Baltic countries.

Identification of Exemplars.

Explanation of workpackage expenditures
Only staff days are allocated for this WP - there is no travel and subsistence allocation foreseen. This is to ensure a highly efficient production of the worldwide mass of information required. Experience shows that a "stub" country report for an English-speaking small country with good documentation can be created in half a day - thus any travel time cuts deeply into productivity.

To ensure that the field research task is feasible we do not aim to cover "all" the countries in the world. There is a general rubric of more focus on countries in the high- and middle-income categories (in the World Bank classification) and less focus on both countries with under 100,000 inhabitants (thus much smaller than any EU country) and countries with less linguistic or socio-cultural links to the EU.

For a typical country report (such as Greece) we allocate around 4 days for the general country report and 2 days per exemplar institution/projects. A further 2 days is allowed for regular updates (in Year 2) of the country report. Note that some bigger countries have tariffs of 15 or even 20 days (for large federal countries) and a few smaller countries have as low as 5 - such as Cyprus.

Region tariffs typically range from 15 (such as Commonwealth LAC) to 20 (such as Middle East, Anglophone Africa and Francophone Africa) with a few island regions at just 10 (such as Commonwealth Oceania).

The WP Leader has a set of 15 extra days to develop the templates for country reports, subcontinental region reports and exemplar reports, and to monitor the quality of all country/region reports and exemplar reports produced in the WP.

A detailed spreadsheet was constructed to plan the country-by-country effort for this workpackage.

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