Promoting and Implementing Digital STEM Education at Secondary Schools in Africa

This paper discusses an ongoing initiative aimed at promoting and implementing digital STEM education at secondary schools in Africa. This initiative, coined Go-Lab Goes Africa (GO-GA), is an innovation action supported by the European Commission through its H2020 Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The general vision and the implementation strategy are outlined in detail, as well as the challenges faced and results achieved during its first year

Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry–based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

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 usage data suggest have been used in classrooms. Our data show that teachers prefer to start their design from empty templates instead of more domain–related elements, that the makeup of the design team (a single teacher, a group of collaborating teachers, or a mix of teachers and project members) influences key design process characteristics such as time spent designing the ILS and number of actions involved, that the characteristics of the resulting ILSs also depend on the type of design team and that ILSs that are openly shared (i.e., published in a public repository) have different characteristics than those that are kept private.</p

Cloud ecosystem for supporting inquiry learning with online labs: Creation, personalization, and exploitation

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

Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry-based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

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 usage data suggest have been used in classrooms. Our data show that teachers prefer to start their design from empty templates instead of more domain-related elements, that the makeup of the design team (a single teacher, a group of collaborating teachers, or a mix of teachers and project members) influences key design process characteristics such as time spent designing the ILS and number of actions involved, that the characteristics of the resulting ILSs also depend on the type of design team and that ILSs that are openly shared (i.e., published in a public repository) have different characteristics than those that are kept private