About INES

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• About INES

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  • INES is an imaginary name we have given to our project. INES represents any student who enters into the  "tunnel” but who, thanks to the contribution of an authentic and inclusive education program promoted by his/her school context (together with other important actors), succeeds in getting out of it, by changing the course of his/her life. Therefore, INES represents a positive and powerful image of possibility, an example of success that something can really change with respect to the contrast and spread of new drugs of abuse at school. New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) represent a large and increasing group of compounds mainly of synthetic nature, characterised by pharmacological and toxicological properties particularly dangerous for the health of consumers. The emergence of NSP in recent years is a worrying phenomenon that is taking on ever more imposing dimensions: NPS have become a global phenomenon with over 110 countries and territories from all regions of the world having reported one or more NPS. Up to December 2017, more than 800 substances have been reported by governments, laboratories and partner organisations. (source: https://www.unodc.org/documents/scientific/NPS_leaflet_2018_EN.pdf). As underlined in the last European Drug Report (EMCDDA, 2018) the “New psychoactive substances continue to challenge public health”: [the priority is] to identify and respond to the emergence of drugs that has been lacking elsewhere”. Furthermore, it is also relevant to clearly identify the specific characteristics of the “market” where the NPS are available, and who are the target groups (consumers) of this type of compounds. The ESPAD Report (2015) identified, for example, a growing number (3-4%) of 15-to 16-year-old school students in 24 European countries which frequently use NPS. Under this framework, INES project intends, on one side, to valorise, adapt and reuse - in the context of secondary education - the results of “Learning Toxicology through Open Educational Resources - TOX-OER” E+ project; on the other side, INES aims to strengthening the teaching profession by developing learning contents and innovative teaching methods to overcome the NPS abuse phenomenon, starting from the more vulnerable and exposed target group: secondary school students. In order to promote prevention and early intervention focusing on risk of new drug abuse, processes of didactic innovation in secondary education, are to be mediated by a transversal use of digital technologies. INES project intends - within an action research approach - to create the conditions to support the collaborative networking of teachers, academic partner and students to find, test, adapt and use (in the ordinary teaching practices) didactic strategies & resources to tackle the NPS problem. Action research is deemed to support teaching in coping with the challenges of carrying innovations in a reflective way while introducing NPS abuse. In this direction, INES aims to enhance the collaboration with existing networks and stakeholders, active in each partner’s area, which may contribute to increase the knowledge and awareness about the NPS topic. By doing so, INES promotes knowledge acquisition on NPS and supports the development of a variety of learning approaches, including the use of digital technologies in education, training and learning settings and promotes collaboration to educational staff development supporting learning processes to enhance key competences and skills of students. With the aforementioned premise that the majority of the “new consumers” of NPS comes from the age group 15-16 years old, the school can certainly represent a significant context where to improve knowledge and propose effective strategies to tackle the abuse of the above-mentioned substances
    

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• INES background
  • The INES project sustains the creation of Open Educational Resources, open Handbook, and Open Source Educational Software (game digital platform), as well as supporting teachers, students and school leaders, and other teaching professions. The project foresees, on one side, the co-construction of Open Educational Resources (involving teachers and academic partners - e.g. academic staff and researchers) on a topic of great importance in Europe, such as New Psychoactive Substance (NPS), a large and increasing group of molecules mainly of synthetic origin, characterised by pharmacological and toxicological properties particularly dangerous for the health of consumers. On the other hand, INES promotes the design and experimentation of educational paths, valorising the teachers’ and students’ innovative role/roles to strength the profiles of the teaching professions and to tackle early school leaving and disadvantage. In this way an effective combination of digital technologies (e.g. online videos, online schemes/documents, or software like Kahoot!, Quizizz, WooClap etc.), active learning strategies (using gaming, questioning, cooperative learning or peer instruction techniques etc.) and didactic contents, will be promoted within classrooms characterised by the presence of vulnerable students i.e. secondary school students. All materials produced during the project lifecycle will be released under Creative Commons licenses. This will make the INES project sustainable, allowing other teachers or trainers to use, reuse, adapt and implement the resources produced within the project in other school environments and experiences. The above-mentioned approaches and strategies, within the framework of the INES project, will be described within a digital collaborative Handbook. Importantly, all these materials and resources will be available in English as well as in the different languages of INES partners (Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, French). This makes this material available for millions of teachers, of students and of academic staff, and of researchers inside and outside of Europe. Furthermore, the OERs created in the framework of the INES project could be used in the LifeLong Learning frame of reference, in which OERs showed great potential in diverse social, economic and cultural contexts reaching (potentially) huge audiences of disadvantaged backgrounds. By doing so, OERs potential to tackle early school leaving is seen as an effective intervention strategy to deal with new drug abuse among secondary school students. In order to reduce early school leaving and disadvantage, it is essential to recognise and valorise both the so called “student agency” that can be defined as “the power to make choices” and the development of students’ critical capacity. Students with agency are those who feel a high level of responsibility and ownership for their own learning. INES aims to strengthen the collaboration among all actors within schools, as well as with families, and other external stakeholders, by supporting didactic innovation and collaborative teaching and learning approaches on NPS topic. As recently recommended by OECD (2018), school curricula should be designed around students to motivate them and recognise their prior knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. Following this direction, INES will promote students voice (participative approaches) during the creation and adaptation of learning contents, teaching strategies and games design to face NPS diffusion at schools. Actually, the involvement of students as co-producers of learning materials and the engagement of students and teachers in the co-design of “games prototype” could be underlined as a way to boost digital skills and competences in line with the Council Recommendations (2018) that are assumed to be crucial for personal development, employability, social inclusion and active citizenship.
    

  • Expected outcomes:

    • The creation of a European syllabus on the NPS topic addressed to school education. The expected result will be to incorporate - during the last year of the project – the above-mentioned topic into the curriculum of each partner school. The curriculum should be designed around students to motivate them and recognize their prior knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values (OECD 2018). 
    • The publication of a short-blended learning course on NPS - addressed to teachers, students and educators available within the open-source INES online platform (based on Moodle). 
    • The design and development of a hybrid board game. In order to address an issue as complex as NPS, it seems appropriate to mobilize the personal experience of each actor by creating an immersive structure that guarantees a strong involvement of the player in order to foster active learning on the part of the student. 
    • The design and publication into the INES micro MOOC platform of Open Educational Resources (OERs) co-produced by teachers, academic partners (e.g. academic staff and researchers), and external experts (e.g. case reports, video interviews, multimedia presentations, proposal of didactic activities and game) and published with open licenses (e.g. Creative Commons, GNU, etc.). 
    • The publication (online/paper) of the INES Collaborative Handbook (ICH) contains all the learning contents, the teaching strategies, and game structures developed during the project lifecycle. 
    • An open-access publication (Book) with the presentation of the project, the results of didactics experimentations, and the main organizational, technical and didactical recommendations to transfer the results to other educational experiences.

    
    

• Work Packages

  WP-1. Ines syllabus and piloting

  Academic partners develop a syllabus proposal on the NPS topic. At the end of this process, the syllabus is presented and shared with the teachers of the partner schools.

  The work proceeds with the construction of an anonymous survey to identify the students' knowledge (and any previous experience) with respect to NPS.

  The data collected through the survey will be used to map the macro characteristics of the pilot schools (located in three different European countries), and to identify the training needs of students and teachers. 

  Each partner university, within the pilot schools and based on the collected data, organizes a short blended-learning course addressed to students, teachers, and educators in order to introduce the topic of NPS (knowledge phase).

  The work continues with the identification of educational strategies and collaborative content design involving pilot schools and (potential) external stakeholders. Each partner meets the schools (teachers) and realizes of co-planning of the learning paths (based on the Syllabus). All the contents (OERs) created in form of Didactic Units will be made available in the section of the platform "micro-Open Online Course".

  
  

  WP-2. Ideation, design and game implementation

  WP2 starts with the recognition of game structures and with the development of a design template for schools. 

  The pilot schools (students and teachers) are involved in the co-design of "games prototype" according to the  "storytelling architectures" shared with the classes. The involvement of students during the preliminary phase of scriptwriting is essential.

  Each school internally identifies, at least, 5 classes (per year) participating in a “competition of ideas” promoted within the  project. Without prejudging the outcome of the work, that will be carried out in the pilot schools, a game approach with rich storytelling that invites identification and promotes empathy will promote.

  The working groups (students, teachers, and academic partners) will be guided and accompanied in the realization of the games by game design experts and academic partners (e.g. academic staff and researchers) involved in the  INES project. 

  The Wp continues with the technical implementation of the game formats. The game selected through a competition of ideas is concretely realized, described, and made available in the collaborative Handbook (see WP3).

  
  

  WP-3. Collaborative development and testing of learning paths

  The collaborative Handbook is a methodological and pedagogical guide for teachers and educators to assist, step by step, the schools in the subsequent phases of didactic experimentation. In this Wp, the methodological,  strategic, and content components are in continuous interaction. Both in the pilot schools and in the associated schools (after the first experimentation we will publish a call for interest in order to find associate further schools to test the contents and strategies developed during the first year of the INES project), a series of didactic  experimentation will be carried out on the basis of the guidelines described in the handbook.

  This Wp consists of 2 steps: a) identification and description of teaching strategies (and digital technologies) that can be exploited to effectively convey the contents on the NPS topic (Didactic Units); b) collaborative content creation (OERs) and game design involving pilot schools and (potential) external stakeholders.

  The experimentation phase involves, at least, 5 classes per year for each institute/partner country (total:  minimum expected: 30 classes). 

  The first experimentation will be organized at the end of the first year of the INES project to test/adapt the contents and the strategies (formalized as Didactict Units)  developed by teachers in collaboration with INES academic partners (e.g. academic staff and researchers). 

  The second experimentation will be organized between the second and the third year of the project to test/adapt the collaborative Handbook. The learning contents (Open Educational Resources), the teaching-learning strategies and game structures tested during the experimentation will be made available in the collaborative Handbook.