...
Eduroam (education roaming) is the secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and education community.
Having started in Europe, eduroam has gained momentum throughout the research and education community and is now available in 89 territories worldwide (https://www.eduroam.org/where/).
Eduroam allows students, researchers and staff from participating institutions to obtain Internet connectivity across campus and when visiting other participating institutions by simply opening their laptop.
High quality, security, worldwide availability in numerous places like campuses, museums, libraries, labs, public places, as well as ease of use of eduroam make it an ideal internet access supporting Always-on education concept.
2.2. Eduroam at schools
According to the results of WP5 survey, currently eduroam is not widespread at schools - only 10% (3 of 29 pilot schools who responded to the survey) of school principals declares that there is eduroam access at their school, only 1 school declared that its students can authenticate to eduroam.
Only 10% pilot school declares that eduroam is available at other locations, either near the school or that are usually visited by students of the school. According to analyses presented in Section 2.3, eduroam is available within 1 km from the 37% of the pilot schools, which clearly shows that students and teachers do not benefit from eduroam's potential. The issue could be further investigated in the scope of the Up2U project. At the first glance, it seems to be related to the weak popularisation of eduroam in the educational world, eduroam policies or legal issues rather than to the infrastructure limitations.
Therefore, the objective of the project seems to be justifiable - not to deploy eduroam at new places, but to study the current availability of eduroam and to investigate solutions that enable students to get access to the network at existing locations, that can be then covered by the formal and informal learning scenarios.
2.3. Eduroam near schools
This section contains summary on eduroam availability in the neighbourhood of the pilot schools taking part in the Up2U project. The summary is a result of comparison of information accessible in the eduroam service location database (https://monitor.eduroam.org/map_service_loc.php) with information on localisations of Up2U pilot schools supplied by the pilot countries.
Verification of possibility to incorporate the selected eduroam locations into the formal and informal learning scenarios was conducted with the pilot countries taking part in the Up2U project. Since network availability is the key to the Always-on education concept, neither formal nor informal learning scenarios could benefit from the limitation of eduroam access to some particular location types such as campuses, museums, libraries, labs, public places. Thus students and teachers should have the capability of using eduroam wherever it is available.
Analysis has proven that availability of eduroam in the neighbourhood of the pilot schools is very high. In 37% of cases, it is possible to find eduroam access within walking distance from the school (less than 1 km). Most of the pilot schools (65%) are located less than 5 km from the closest eduroam location.
An average number of eduroam location available within 20 km from the pilot school varies from country to country and can reach up to 63.25 locations.
Detailed information on eduroam availability in the neighbourhood of the pilot schools can be found in Appendix A. Eduroam near schools - details.
Pilot schools, as well as eduroam availability in their neighbourhood, are depicted in the interactive map below.