Net Media Lab has successfully participated in the ERASMUS+ (Strategic Partnership for adult education) project OPALESCE: Online Portal and Active Learning System for Senior Citizens in Europe, which is about to complete its funding lifetime shortly.

The goal of the project OPALESCE was to create a learning system focused on senior citizens that runs on mobile devices and downloads open learning content from an online platform. The role of N.C.S.R. “Demokritos” was to design and develop this online platform where potential educational content developers can upload educational content. The learning system integrates different media formats and interactivity into an innovative "micro unit" format suited even for small screen devices such as smartphones. The idea is to present learning content in small units that only fill one screen, and the user can go to the next page by swiping to the next screen almost as if turning the page of the book.

Seeing the ever growing interest of senior citizens in technology and in learning and also the need of educational content creators to share their knowledge with a broader audience, the OPALESCE consortium was eager to create an e-learning environment that was primarily based on the needs of senior citizens in order to assist their lifelong learning capabilities and facilitate their e-inclusion.

The front-end of the online platform presents basic information about the Micro Units so that the end users (senior citizens) can browse through them before taking the complete course on the OPALESCE Mobile App. On the other hand, the back-end provides a user friendly interface for potential educational creators to upload their Micro Units.

The online platform can be found at http://opl.iit.demokritos.gr where potential content creators can create an account and login to the system in order to upload educational content in the form of Micro Units.

The OPALESCE Mobile App can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for Android phones and from the iOS store for iOS phones.

We invite anyone interested in uploading educational content on our e-learning platform to contact us and contribute to the expansion of the learning community and to the sustainability of the OPALESCE project.

For more information:

Project website: http://opalesce.eduproject.eu/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Online-Portal-and-Active-Learning-System-for-Senior-Citizens-in-Europe-1630677803820855/
E-mail: ypapa@iit.demokritos.gr
Tel: +30-210-6503230