The aim of the Open Discovery International Space Summer Academy 2015 was to support school innovation and to train school leaders and leading members of school staff to promote the development of their schools into open learning communities, and thus improve the quality of all aspects of schooling. This year the Summer school addressed 3 particular areas that are viewed as key for school innovation:

1) Training teachers in Educational design, with particular reference to Universal Design for Learning Principles

2) Opening the school to the community and engaging the parents

3) Introducing game-based learning elements in educational design and teaching

An overarching goal was also to support creative thinking in order to promote all these three innovation components and develop even further teachers’ educational design competences.

Thirty four teachers and Heads of schools participated, coming from Poland, Cyprus, the UK, Portugal, Ireland, Lithuania, Finland, Turkey, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Serbia, Croatia and Romania. Almost half of them were  ERASMUS+ programme grantees. Also, ods2015 contest winners (National Educational Scenario Contests and Innovative Schools' Contest) also participated, after having won a scholarship for the Summer school. The course, as well as all training material, was delivered in English.

On the first day the participants were introduced in the scope of the course within the overall Open Discovery Space approach for school innovation. They were then divided in two groups and got engaged in pair activities, in order to introduce themselves to the group but also to reflect on their own competences and professional profile.

The second and third day of the course focused interchangeably for the two groups a) on creative thinking through a “Thinking at the Edge” workshop, that was ran by experts from the Hellenic Focusing Centre. The aim was to engage the participants in alternative ways of thinking in order to further expand their ideas and become more creative as teachers and designers of educational scenarios; b) on competence based educational design through the use of digital tools. The ods2015 portal and authoring tools were demonstrated and the participants were guided into uploading their educational scenarios on the Summer School 2015 digital community. The scenarios cover a wide array of curriculum subjects, from Astronomy and Physics to Humanities, Language and Social Sciences.

Parental engagement was also addressed as a key factor for school development and thus the fourth day of the course focused on engaging the parents to schooling. It was a dedicated workshop on parental engagement, ran by Prof. Alex Kendall and Dr Eleni Kanira from Birmingham City University, which examined perceptions about parental engagement, included teachers’ presentations of good practices of parental engagement and hands-on activities for addressing any barriers in schools’ and parents’ partnerships.

A joint workshop for both groups took place on the fifth day that focused on game- based learning, facilitated by members of the Ellinogermaniki Agogi team, Dr Lilia Dimaraki, Nikos Zygouritsas and Pavlos Koulouris. Through group activities the participants were encouraged to explore the benefits of using games in education and to design educational games that could enrich the educational scenarios they had prepared.

Finally, the participants presented their educational scenarios to the group on the last day of the course, which are publicly available through the Summer school digital community.

In between workshops a series of out-door activities were organized, such as a visit to the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum in Athens, a visit to Cape Sounion and the Temple of Poseidon, and a farewell dinner in Marathon.