Welcome to the fourth edition of the eTEACHER project newsletter!

During this last semester, we have been focused on finalizing our tools and aiming to starting our demonstration in our 12 pilots’ buildings. As you know, our eTEACHER App includes a nice variety of tools to engage buildings’ users in an environment friendly behaviour while keeping safe indoor conditions. To achieve a real change of behaviour, we need to achieve a joyful user experience. For that purpose, firstly, we launched our eTEACHER App only for a selected number of users in each of our pilot buildings. They provided their observations that helped us making our App more attractive. Based on this, we have developed interactive and appealing materials to train the building users, ease their experience with our App and increase our tools acceptance. We are finalizing our latest developments in our tools getting ready for a massive deployment to all our users once the COVID19 crisis is over. 

In the meantime, we are very committed with the Societal Challenge we are facing these days due to the devastating effects of the coronavirus situation. Our eTEACHER project can provide some insights to entertain and teach people on these difficult days. In this regard, we have launched our own #eTEACHERatHOME campaign, on the one hand, and are also participating in the #HeroAtHome campaign with our sister projects. Our aim is to support people in saving energy and improving indoor environmental quality at home by means of easy to follow and friendly tips. Saving energy at home is very important these days since home is where we stayed and consume energy 24/7. Besides, keeping good indoor environmental conditions is key to win the COVID 19 battle. 

In this #StayatHome situation, we are prioritizing the deployment of our eTEACHER App in our residential buildings in Spain and Romania. We are working hard on how to engage our residential buildings inhabitant and how to teach them behaving environment respectful while keeping healthy conditions at home. Then, once schools and offices are open again and back to normal life, we will perform accordingly with teachers, students and staff at schools and offices. We hope that we united defeat the coronavirus soon and can resume our interesting validation activities.

Finally, I would like to inform you about some other activities that we have been performing oriented towards increasing the impact of our eTEACHER project. On the one hand, in October 2019 and taking advantage of our General Assembly meeting, we had an Ad Hoc Workshop provided by the Support Services for Exploitation of Research Results (SSERR) of the European Commission. This workshop was focused on the characterization of our key exploitable results and the steps towards an effective exploitation strategy and plan to ensure successful exploitation of our results after the project. Regarding dissemination activities, among others, our project was included in the webinar “5 European projects with its innovative ICT solutions for energy savings in the spotlight” organized by Build Up initiative that took place on the 29th January 2020. Dr. Gloria Calleja presented our developments. 

In this issue, you will be able to learn about how rebound effects, nudging and competition affect energy saving, our social media campaign to save energy during the lockdown (and over), a focus on our pilot building InCity in Romania and the upcoming events.

Don’t forget to check out our website and use social media (twitter and Linkedin) to inform your network about our exciting news!

Dr. Noemi Jiménez-Redondo
eTEACHER coordinator