Golabz: Towards a Federation of Online Labs for Inquiry-Based Science Education at School (original) (raw)
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GO-LAB ECOSYSTEM: USING ONLINE LABORATORIES IN A PRIMARY SCHOOL
11th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies. Palma de Mallorca, Spain. 1st - 3rd of July, 2019. EDULEARN19 Proceedings, ISBN: 978-84-09-12031-4. https://library.iated.org/view/DZIABENKO2019GOL , 2019
Online (virtual and remote) experiments are the essential part of the contemporary science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Although online experiments are broadly employed in higher and secondary school class instructions, they should still be presented in a primary school to teachers, education administration, and designers such as curriculum developers and assessment creators. This paper focuses on the planning and embedding online laboratories into primary school science curriculum. The challenges of implementation of different types of laboratories in a practical context are discussed as well. The integration of the laboratories is demonstrated using the Go-Lab ecosystem. The ecosystem consists of more than 600 online laboratories, 40 inquiry applications, 940 inquiry learning spaces (ILS) that are presented with more than 30 languages (as at the time of writing this paper). Moreover, the Go-Lab platform supports teachers to realize science education by offering interactive domain-related applications that enable inclusive, active and engaged learning, providing students with tools that support these forms of learning and train 21st century skills such as digital literacy, computational thinking, research culture, and creativity. The modernization of the school education encourages teachers to start modelling such students skills from their very early age. The paper shows all phases of embedding the laboratories into the inquiry environment. It describes several demanded activities that a teacher shall perform. It includes (1) mapping the lesson; (2) defining the lesson goals where the lab will be used; (3) establishing the type of the online experiments that should be embedded; (4) defining critical points of the usage of the experiment; (5) creating usage guide in a language suitable for the student age. The authors believe that the paper will be useful for primary school teachers as well as for developers of the online laboratories for elementary school students.
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.
Innovations in STEM education: the Go-Lab federation of online labs
Smart Learning Environments, 2014
The Go-Lab federation of online labs opens up virtual laboratories (simulation), remote laboratories (real equipment accessible at distance) and data sets from physical laboratory experiments (together called "online labs") for large-scale use in education. In this way, Go-Lab enables inquiry-based learning that promotes acquisition of deep conceptual domain knowledge and inquiry skills, with the further intent of interesting students in careers in science. For students, Go-Lab offers the opportunity to perform scientific experiments with online labs in pedagogically structured learning spaces. Go-Lab's inquiry learning spaces (ILSs) structure the students' inquiry process through an inquiry cycle and provide students with guidance in which dedicated (and connected) scaffolds for inquiry processes play a pivotal role. Teachers can create and adapt inquiry learning phases and the associated guidance in an ILS through a simple wiki-like interface and can add scaffolds and tools to an ILS using a straightforward drag and drop feature. Teachers can also adapt scaffolds and tools (e.g., change the language or the concepts available in a concept mapper) through an "app composer". In creating ILSs, teachers are supported by scenarios and associated defaults ILSs that can be used as a starting point for development. In addition, teachers are offered a community framework to disseminate best practices and find mutual support. For lab-owners, Go-Lab provides open interfacing solutions for easily plugging in their online labs and sharing them in the Go-Lab federation of online labs. In its first year, Go-Lab created ILSs for thirteen online labs from different lab providers, including renowned research organizations (e.g., CERN, ESA) that participate in the consortium. The design of these inquiry learning spaces has been evaluated through mock-ups and prototypes with students and teachers. More advanced and later versions will be evaluated and validated in large scale pilots. The sustainability of Go-Lab will come from the opportunity for the larger science education community to add new online labs and share ILSs. An open and Web-based community will capitalize on the "collective intelligence" of students, teachers, and scientists.
Diffusion of Online Labs and Inquiry-Based Science Teaching Methods and Practices Across Europe
INTED2017 Proceedings, 2017
This paper addresses the challenge of modernizing science teaching in secondary education schools by introducing and implementing the use of online labs and inquiry learning approaches and by proposing and offering an integrated framework of methods and tools that are freely available to science teachers and educators. An advanced educational repository (Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School-Go-Lab) was developed to offer access to a unique collection of online labs and relevant resources for this purpose. In this paper we first describe and discuss the objectives and the methodology for diffusion of online labs and of inquiry-based science teaching methods and practices across the participating European countries. Then the quantitative results and qualitative outcomes of the methods adopted are also presented and discussed in detail. The data are coming from 1000 schools with the participation of several thousand teachers and students in 15 countries across Europe and beyond. These school communities have used the Go-Lab repository for three years. The collected data and their analysis indicate that a) teachers-having access to numerous resources-are progressively adopting existing resources and finally developing their own lessons based on the inquiry approach and b) that experimentation with online labs could be effectively integrated to the existing school curricula.
GO-GA: Class Experiences with Offline Inquiry Learning Spaces in Go-Lab
2020 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE)
This paper reports on a study carried out in the framework of the Go-lab Goes Africa project, in which teachers implemented online and offline Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILS) in their classes using the Go-lab platform. After a brief description of the Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) methodology, of lab work and in particular virtual labs for STEM education, and of the process of preparing teachers for using IBL in class, we highlight the methodology used in this study, and finally report the results. Our results show that (i) the introduction and class enactment of a digital inquiry-based learning platform in Africa is possible (although challenging with respect to pedagogy and infrastructure), and (ii) does lead to student learning, (iii) for this to take place teacher training with respect to the Inquiry Based Learning methodology, and the development of an ILS are necessary, (iv) the digital infrastructure at school is sufficient for offline use, however, poses problems when online ILSs are used, and (v) a local partner needs to provide assistance, mainly to set up the infrastructure (installation of the ILS and the viewer) at the beginning of the lesson, and to assist students with computer related queries.
Class Experiences with Inquiry Learning Spaces in Go-Lab in African Secondary Schools
African Journal of Teacher Education
Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) is a form of active learning, often used in STEM education to promote conceptual learning and to acquire scientific investigation skills. This paper reports on a study in which teachers in Kenya, Nigeria and the Republic of Benin implemented IBL embedded in online and offline Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILS) in their classes using the Go-Lab platform (https://www.golabs.eu). After a brief description of the IBL methodology, of lab work and in particular virtual labs for STEM education, of the process of preparing teachers to use IBL in class, and of the context of this study, we highlight the methodology used, and finally report our results. These show that the introduction and class enactment of a digital inquiry based learning platform such as Go-Lab in Africa (i) is possible, although challenging, (ii) does lead to student learning, (iii) for this to take place teacher training is necessary, (iv) the digital infrastructure is present in the schools thoug...
The Go-Lab Inventory and Integration of Online Labs - Labs Offered by Universities
2014
This document is the outcome of the work done during the 2nd year of the project in task “T2.2 - Organizing Online Labs for the Go-Lab Federation: from Small to Big Ideas of Science”, in task “T2.3 – The Go-lab Inventory of Online Labs” and Task “T2.4 – Populating the Go-Lab inventory”. The document describes (a) the process of populating the Go-Lab Inventory for year 2, (b) the main characteristics of the new online labs (including quality, diversity, multilingualism) and (c) explains in detail the steps towards the development of a federated ecosystem of online labs and educational resources (inquiry learning activities that are making use of a lab – or a series of labs) that could be available to the users (namely science teachers) through an effective search mechanism. Overall the Go-Lab inventory includes currently 48 online labs (the initial indicator was to have 45 online labs at the end of the project) out of which 13 were integrated during the 1st year of the project and 35...
Educational Technology Research and Development
Designing and implementing online or digital learning material is a demanding task for teachers. This is even more the case when this material is used for more engaged forms of learning, such as inquiry learning. In this article, we give an informed account of Go-Lab, an ecosystem that supports teachers in creating Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs). These ILSs are built around STEM–related online laboratories. Within the Go-Lab ecosystem, teachers can combine these online laboratories with multimedia material and learning apps, which are small applications that support learners in their inquiry learning process. The Go-Lab ecosystem offers teachers ready–made structures, such as a standard inquiry cycle, alternative scenarios or complete ILSs that can be used as they are, but it also allows teachers to configure these structures to create personalized ILSs. For this article, we analyzed data on the design process and structure of 2414 ILSs that were (co)created by teachers and that our...
Reviewing inquiry-based learning approaches invirtual laboratory environment for science education
Διεθνές Συνέδριο για την Ανοικτή & εξ Αποστάσεως Εκπαίδευση, 2019
In science education, students’ active involvement in experimental procedures contributes to higher performance achievements compared to traditional lecturing, as laboratories play a key role and help learners develop the necessary skills of inquiry. Inquiry-based learning, a learning method based on students’ personal involvement in the cognitive process through searching, querying and posing questions, is an educational approach where in the case of research, the learner formulates hypotheses which tests them via experimentation and observation of the experimental results. The educational value of the inquiry learning method has been verified in several studies, where the application of the inquiry learning approach resulted in more effective learning, compared to traditional teacher-centered methods. The evolution of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) contributed towards the popularity of the inquiry-based learning, since it supports the development of educational approaches and environments which facilitate the inquiry learning process. Virtual reality laboratories give the user the opportunity to conduct the same scientific inquiry provided by hands-on experiments but with the advantages of the virtual environment. The present study focuses on the identification of the inquiry-based learning applications and methods used based on virtual laboratories in the field of science. The peer-reviewed literature was the main source of information and data. The findings of the reviewed studies indicated that virtual labs, when used in combination with hands-on labs in inquiry learning, support learners and help them gain deeper conceptual understanding of science
The Experiment Editor: Supporting Inquiry-Based Learning with Virtual Labs
Inquiry-based learning is a pedagogical approach where students are motivated to pose their own questions when facing problems or scenarios. In physics learning, students are turned into scientists who carry out experiments, collect and analyze data, formulate and evaluate hypothesis, etc. Being lab experimentation essential for inquiry-based learning, traditional hands-on labs have important drawbacks as they involve high costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff. Virtual laboratories are helpful to reduce those costs. This paper enriches the virtual lab ecosystem by providing an integrated environment to automate experimentation tasks. In particular, our environment supports (i) scripting and running experiments on virtual labs, and (ii) collecting and analyzing data from the experiments. The current implementation of our environment supports virtual labs created with the the authoring tool Easy Java/Javascript Simulations. Since there are public repositories with hundreds of freely available labs created with this tool, the potential applicability of our environment is considerable.