Objectives & Current Results
Main Objective
The main objective of the enetCollect Action is to address the major European challenge of fostering the language skills of all citizens regardless of their diversified social, educational, and linguistic backgrounds. To this end, the Action is concerned with the domain of Language Learning and specifically focuses on enhancing the production of learning material in order to cope with the increasing demand for language learning material and the striking diversification of learner profiles. EnetCollect will address this challenge by kick-starting a Research and Innovation (R&I) trend that combines the well-established domain of Language Learning with recent and successful crowdsourcing approaches in order to trigger an innovation breakthrough for the production of language learning material.
To address its main objective, enetCollect will also involve a variety of R&I players who are working on language-related topics and have laborious and/or complex tasks that can be approached by crowdsourcing. Indeed, even though Language Learning might not be of direct interest to them, being able to make use of a vast and continuous workforce generated by crowdsourcing on learners’ and teachers’ actions constitutes a ground-breaking opportunity for experts e.g. in linguistics, computational linguistics or software engineering/ergonomics. By involving language-related R&I players, enetCollect aims at favoring its flexible and sustainable success in numerous, concurrent and mutually beneficial ways.
The main objective of enetCollect will be addressed by pursuing seven specific COST objectives. COST Actions distinguish objectives related to the creation of knowledge, termed Research-Coordination Objectives, and objectives related to creating and empowering a community, termed Capacity-Building Objectives.
Research-Coordination Objectives
Objective 1: Creating a theoretical framework for achieving a shared understanding of the topic, ranging from very concrete aspects such as defining a common terminology, to higher-level aspects such as evaluating the potential and limits of related approaches. This objective is pursued by the Working Groups and focuses on transforming the tacit knowledge of members into a consensual and codified form, and on the creation of blueprints (design specifications) at any relevant level (technical, usability, ethical, etc.).
Current Results. Till September 2018, the 30 presentations and 39 posters at network meetings and 17 research stays have contributed to the first building blocks of the foreseen theoretical frame-work, especially with regards to the state-of-the-art review.
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Objective 2: Gathering evaluation data for complementing the theoretical framework with factual information obtained from prototypical experiments and wide-ranging surveys in order to extend and root the theoretical framework and evaluate which aspects should be approached first.
Current Results. This objective will mostly be addressed from December 2018 on. For more information, see the tasks 1.4, 2.4 and 3.3 in the official MoU.
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Objective 3: Disseminating the knowledge created and the achievements obtained to any relevant audience.
Current Results. Till September 2018, 4 calls for research stays and 5 calls for meeting participation were distributed and drew attention (and members) to enetCollect. Aside from one invited talk, several early activities for publications at conferences of related research communities are ongoing. All STSM reports have been made available on the dedicated part of the website.
Capacity-Building Objectives
Objective 4: Creating a balanced interdisciplinary core community of active stakeholders (and a core crowd reachable through it). This objective will be pursued by steadily expanding the network while maintaining a balance of member characteristics), through the Working Groups and through innovative dissemination and exploitation activities devised to foster collaborations, with special focus on ECIs (Early Career Investigators).
Current Results. Till september 2018, the already large initial number of 68 individual members from 34 participating countries at the time of the proposal has increased by 67% to 114 members and by 10% to 38 countries. The people subscribed to enetCollect’s general mailing list have increased by 149% from 79 to 197. Also, 17 financed STSMs, lasting 183 days overall, led to intense cooperations. 3 meetings and 1 training school were organized with a total of 168 participants. More detailed statistics on enetCollect core community can be found on the dedicated statistics page.
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Objective 5: Establishing communication channels. This objective aims to ensure that the created community has well-identified communication channels allowing to easily share information and reach relevant members or stakeholders.
Current Results. Till September 2018, enetCollect’s intranet and website have been made available in August and October 2017 and are currently holding a substantial and growing amount of information. 12 mailing lists allowing the different components of enetCollect (Working groups, core group, etc.) to communicate were created. Dedicated Twitter and Facebook were also initiated to communicate enetCollect achievements on social medias. Statistics regarding enetCollect’s communication channels will be provided in due time.
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Objective 6: Fostering new funded initiatives. This objective aims to foster new initiatives complementing the Action. This objective will be pursued by using the Action’s achievements to plan
parallel or follow-up projects and its indicator of completion will be the successful preparation of two large proposals for European follow-up projects as well as several proposals to different regional and national funding schemes.
Current Results. Till September 2018, three projects were submitted in 2017, of which two got positively evaluated but not funded, and one got funded by a Swiss agency. An internal campaign to foster proposals for Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships was also orchestrated at the beginning of 2018 and dedicated presentation and training opportunities were organized during the 2nd Annual Meeting. A dedicated page of the website was also created to describe specific funding opportunities. For more information on enetCollect-related projects, see the dedicated page.
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Objective 7: Creating an association. This objective aims at creating an association with the purpose of continuing the work started in enetCollect and playing a driving role for the aforementioned community after the conclusion of the Action. This association will follow a long-term agenda, take over and maintain the outputs of the Action and handle subsequent editions of a recurrent scientific event. The indicator of completion for this objective will be the successful creation of a non-profit association and the number of its members.
Current Results. The creation of the association is foreseen towards the end of the third year, beginning of the fourth year.
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Information about the enetCollect’s specific objectives and Workplan can also be found in the Memorandum of Understanding.
Last update of the results performed the 17/09/2018.