Our project offers an innovative approach to addressing educational deficiencies in rural areas: a collaborative virtual educational space where rural schools can support each other, addressing shortages of teachers, content, and activities in an immediate and dynamic manner. We aimed to create a technological environment populated initially by schools and subsequently by relevant entities in the educational and rural development sectors. The objective is to provide rural schools with immediate connectivity, resources, and improved quality of education. Indirectly, this will benefit public and private entities involved in rural development by supporting their educational initiatives, as they participate in the environment and provide content and solutions promptly to the schools. It would also serve as a unique space for research, as the movement of supply and demand for educational resources offers researchers both qualitative and quantitative insights into the situation in each participating region. The idea is scalable to any educational level; in this project, we are focusing on primary education, but it is available for any educational level.
Our focus has been on rural education. Rural education faces significant challenges: - Geographic isolation of the centres. - Students: small numbers, grouped by zones, multi-grade classrooms (a very specific aspect of rural education) which makes it difficult to propose certain tasks and receive public resources. - Facilities: adapted in community spaces. - Materials: limited/shared among relatively nearby rural units. - Didactic elements: scarcity of curricular material and low innovation rate in classrooms. - Teachers: high turnover (difficult to retain them), limited continuous training. The complete absence of teachers in certain subjects can be experienced, resulting in curricular gaps and deficiencies. Currently, rural teachers and students are quite distant from the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu 2017), the European Digital Education Action Plan 21-27, and, particularly for students, the Competences and Skills for the 21st Century. We have created a technological collaborative learning environment that helps to align rural schools with the European educational agenda, and we have initiated a vibrant rural educational community which already includes 135 associated schools.