Personalised learning spaces and federated online labs for STEM Education at School (original) (raw)
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2013
Abstract—The European Commission is funding a large-scale research project on federated online laboratories (Labs) for education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at School. The main educational focus is on inquiry learning and the main technological one is on personalized learning spaces. The learning spaces are offered through a single European social media portal supporting simultaneously teacher communities and student learning activities. This paper presents the general technical framework devised to support the construction and the exploitation of learning spaces, as well as the federation of online labs.
Towards an Online Lab Portal for Inquiry-based STEM Learning at School
Nowadays, the knowledge economy is growing rapidly. To sustain future growth, more well educated people in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are needed. In the Go-Lab project we aim to motivate and orient students from an early age on to study STEM fields in their future educational path by applying inquiry learning using online labs. This paper presents an inquiry learning portal where teachers can discover, use and enhance online labs appropriate for their courses and students can acquire scientific methodology skills while doing experiments using the labs. The Go-Lab portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of online labs, inquiry learning spaces and complementary services. The paper discusses a first version of the portal and our future plans.
Emerge: A European Educational Network for Dissemination of Online Laboratory Experiments
2004
This paper presents the development of the eMerge project, an innovative and advanced educational network structure that will permit the dissemination of online laboratory experiments to support engineering and science education. This project has been performing in the framework of European Community SOCRATES – MINERVA program. Partners from nine different educational institutions are involved in this project. The actual work is based on previous experiences where prototypes of virtual laboratories were realized and successfully demonstrated. By using Web technologies and computer controled instrumentation, students could access to these remote laboratories. The main objective of the actual project is to extend these technologies out of the individual institutions, making the services avalaibles to the european students. In the project, we emphasize the creation of a variety laboratory experiments, and the development of supporting course material and educational practices. From a...
Networked Environments that Create Hybrid Spaces for Learning Science
E-Learning and Digital Media, 2014
Networked learning environments that embed the essence of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework utilise pedagogies that encourage dialogic practices. This can be of significance for classroom teaching across all curriculum areas. In science education, networked environments are thought to support student investigations of scientific problems, including the collection and processing of data, and construction of explanations and conclusions. Student engagement that involves thinking about and questioning key scientific processes and ideas is argued to address the challenges of making school science more relevant. In this article, examples from two studies are presented where New Zealand teachers employed networked technologies, including Moodle (a learning management system) and Wallwisher (an online notice board). These examples illustrate how face-to-face classroom teaching practices can be complemented with online learning practices. The CoI framework was used to examine how the social, cognitive and teaching dimensions of online student communities were similar and yet distinct to the face-to-face communities they belonged to. Findings showed that the CoI framework helped to unpack how networked environments created hybrid spaces where classroom interaction possibilities were extended, and new layers of knowledge construction added in support of students' growing authority and accountability for their learning. "
Golabz: Towards a Federation of Online Labs for Inquiry-Based Science Education at School
2014
This paper represents a repository for online laboratories, learning applications and Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILS) towards introducing Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) in schools. In the first part, a classification scheme for online labs and a methodology for creating a federation of online labs are described. In the second part, technical implementation of the defined classification in the Go-Lab Repository is represented. In the third part, a usage scenario is described targeting science teachers of primary and secondary schools, who want to use online labs in their classroom activities. In sum, this paper aims at communicating the pedagogical background and advantages of the represented approach, as well as opportunities opened up by the Go-Lab Repository for teachers practicing inquiry-based learning activities in their classes.
eMerge: An European Educational Network for Dissemination of online Laboratory Experiments
This paper presents the development of the eMerge project, an innovative and advanced educational network structure that will permit the dissemination of online laboratory experiments to support engineering and science education. This project has been performing in the framework of European Community SOCRATES -MINERVA program. Partners from nine different educational institutions are involved in this project. The actual work is based on previous experiences where prototypes of virtual laboratories were realized and successfully demonstrated. By using Web technologies and computer controled instrumentation, students could access to these remote laboratories. The main objective of the actual project is to extend these technologies out of the individual institutions, making the services avalaibles to the european students. In the project, we emphasize the creation of a variety laboratory experiments, and the development of supporting course material and educational practices. From a pedagogical point of view, it is very important to create a lab-like atmosphere at the client side. We are designing a client interface that lets the student work with instrument-like images, to receive experimental data in suitable formats such as graphs and tables. In the avalaible cases, the experiments are accompanied by on-line simulation tools for further in-depth illustration and comparison. In other case, we provide the ability to reconfigure the experiments on-line, for example by means of switching matrices. To ease the client access to the laboratories, the requirement on the client side is minimal; only a terminal with a Web browser and Internet access is required. We use advanced server systems that can provide the laboratory services in a reliable and secure fashion. New innovative solutions concerning the networking of partner laboratories, server technologies, access control, security, queuing, scalable user interfaces, are being developed using standard web tools like Applets, SOAP, ASP, COM+.
2017 4th Experiment@International Conference (exp.at'17)
To effectively and efficiently implement blended science and technology education, teachers should be able to find educational resources that suit their need, fit with their curricula, and that can be easily exploited in their classroom. The European Union has supported the FP7 Go-Lab Integrated Project (2012-2016) and then the H2020 Next-Lab Innovation Action (2017-2019) to develop and disseminate inquiry learning spaces as open educational resources integrating online labs. This paper presents the technical ecosystem supporting these initiatives and combining loosely-coupled cloud services and platforms. The golabz.eu sharing platform is a repository offering online labs, scaffolding apps, and inquiry learning spaces created by teachers for teachers. The graasp.eu authoring platform is a social media enabling collaborative creation, agile personalization and secure exploitation at school, as well as exchange of best practices between teachers.
This paper presents some essential considerations referred to the constructions performed by European teachers in terms of virtual experiments and lesson plans within the framework of a Virtual community collaborative Space for Sciences education. This framework was set up in the context of the Socrates Comenius 2.1 European project: “VccSSe - Virtual Community Collaborating Space for Science Education”. In this project, teachers from five European countries (Romania, Poland, Finland, Spain and Greece) participated in blended learning courses aiming their training for the use of Information and Communication Technologies in real teaching and learning practices. Within this framework, on-line training materials and virtual experiments were created and developed. After the end of the designed courses, teachers were asked to form their own virtual experiments and lesson plans and then to implement their products in the classrooms. The analysis of the data shows that teachers who participated in the VccSSe Project encouraged by the aforementioned blended course, expressed a favourable feedback related to the implementation of their own virtual experiments in the teaching activities.