OTTER established a Hub that is easily accessible and understandable for our main target group – teachers, but also researchers and educators in general. All partners have been working on bringing experts on board and the platform will continue existing through another EU funded project and hopefully OST network. Numerous live events related to the platform showed a need for such a space to exist and encourage educators and professional to meet and discuss topics of EOC, sustainability, STEAM, etc. with all of their advantages and realistic obstacles. Our Hub is a community where knowledge, ideas and challenges are shared, setting the basis for inspiring new EOC activities and using the OTTER approach.
OTTER's main academic results include:
- a comprehensive literature review that was conducted to identify, organize, and synthesize previous empirical research into the impacts of EOC practices on students (aged 6–18 years) in terms of cognitive, effective, social/interpersonal, and physical/behavioral outcomes; gender and geographical differences in these impacts; methodologies for assessing impacts; and effective tools and practices used by EOC practitioners to achieve these positive impacts
- a detailed analysis of the data gathered from the pilot activities in 4 different countries, including a comparison of student performance across gender and geographical location variables. This thorough analysis is proving that students' engagement in the project activities increased their motivation to learn science. This was evidenced through enhanced relationships with peers and teachers, engagement in class activities and active participation in science-related projects.
- a robust EOC Quality Assurance Protocol (QAP), aiming to introduce a unifying mechanism alongside relevant processes for further improving and advancing the quality and standards relating to EOC Implementations, EOC Practitioners and EOC Institutions.
All of the valuable conclusions from these results will be transformed into scientific research papers and published in relevant science magazines, allowing for the researchers to further build on them.
OTTER also defined the methodology for the OTTER Outdoor Labs and adapted it to each country’s requirements. A monitoring and evaluation framework was also created in order to have a standardised approach to the implementation, design, targets, and coordination strategies for evaluating and monitoring the project. All of these efforts, after pilot implementation and feedback, resulted in the OTTER Learning Platform, an interactive tool aiming to provide support for teachers who want to further learn and implement the OTTER Lab approach. To cater the needs of target groups with varying levels of knowledge, we created beginners, intermediate and advanced courses on sustainability, step-by-step guidelines on how to implement the OTTER Outdoor Lab activities, how to connect EOC and sustainability topics, as well as plenty of good practice examples from various educational systems so that they could be applicable in the widest European context.
OTTER partners will continue exploiting the key results at an institutional level and through various sustainability and dissemination activities planned. The consortium is planning on applying to Horizon Results Booster with sister projects and prolong the life of our Hub through passing it on to a sister project, among other things.
