The Go-Lab Inventory and Integration of Online Labs – Labs Offered by External Partners and Federations

This document is the outcome of the work done during the 3 rd 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”. More specifically, this document presents: the process of populating with online labs the Go-Lab Inventory for year 3; the main characteristics of the online labs included in the repository (including quality, diversity, multilingualism); the work done to conclude the validation of the Go-Lab “Big Ideas of Science” set. the steps towards the establishment of a communication hub between users and lab the validation of the owners; the validation of the Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) metadata model so as to further develop the federated ecosystem of online labs and educational resources (inquiry learning activities that are making use of an online lab – or a series of online labs) that is available to the users (namely science teachers) through an effective search mechanism; the extension of the Go-Lab taxonomy to cover the Technology and Engineering (T&E) subject domains. Overall, the Go-Lab inventory currently includes 161 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 1 st year of the project, 35 during the 2 nd year and 113 during the 3 rd year of the project. Furthermore, the consortium continues its efforts to establish cooperation with additional similar efforts all over the world. The Phet Interactive Simulations, the Concord Consortium, the Amrita University and the Create lab of the New York University are examples of such collaboration. The validation workshops carried out based on the remarks of the reviewers (Big Ideas of Science, Inquiry Learning Spaces metadata model 1 ) were validated with pilot users (namely, science teachers and teachers’ trainers) in the framework of specific workshops and activities. The data were analysed and the results are presented. Overall, 159 potential users were involved in the validation exercises. In particular, 99 users participated in the validation of the metadata elements set for online labs and 60 users were involved in the validation of the Go-Lab set on the “Big Ideas of Science”

Go-Lab Deliverable D6.6 Go-Lab user communities support framework and guidelines

This document (Deliverable D6.6) aims to be the teacher help guide which will accompany and a classroom scenario handbook (Deliverable D1.5) on how to incorporate Go-Lab into the classroom, as is foreseen in the Go-Lab’s Description of Work.It is the outcome of Task 6.5. ‘Go-Lab Users Guidelines (Guidelines and Supporting Materials for Teachers)’ and accordingly aims to:• provide easy step-by-step guides for the use of the Go-Lab Portal and its main components; • present the philosophy of the search mechanism and the main characteristics of the Go-Lab inventory of online labs; • provide an easy step-by-step guide of how teachers can build their own Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) to use in the science classroom; • provide an a step-by-step guide for how teachers can access online support by expert and peer communitiesThe document will be available in conventional and electronic format (through the project’s web site). It will be translated in 12 languages (English, French, German, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Estonian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian, and Polish)

The first year of the "open discovery of stem laboratories" (ODL) project

The Open Discovery of STEM Laboratories (ODL) project, co-funded by the European Community Erasmus+ KA2 program for 30 months, starting from November 2015, involves five countries: Spain, Italy, Greece, Estonia and Lithuania. It aims to implement teacher collaboration in creating and using μMOOCs (very short version of MOOCs-Massive Open Online Courses) for encouraging the use of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) remote/virtual laboratories into lessons. The challenge of the project is to impact on teaching process and inspire pedagogical innovation and modernization by means of open education resources, teaching/learning tools and best practices provided by European educators via the ODL platform. The ODL project consists of different phases: the setting up of the pedagogical scenarios for the design and creation of the μMOOCs, their embedding in school environments and their dissemination to a wide EU audience. The strong points of the project rely on the opportunity for teachers of improving both digital skills and pedagogical competences, experiencing international collaborative work and having the availability of attractive open education resources in national languages, helpful to design creative lessons on STEM topics. In this contribution we present the ODL project and the results obtained in the first year of its activity. In particular, we discuss the difficulty to identify the pedagogical scenarios to be adopted to create suitable μMOOCs for physics education, able to increase student ability to solve real-life problems. The benefits of adopting inquiry-based approaches, differentiated by the amount of information and teacher guidance provided to students (confirmation, structured/guided and elicited/open inquiry), will be discussed and compared

Phases of inquiry-based learning: definitions and the inquiry cycle

International audienceInquiry-based learning is gaining popularity in science curricula, international research anddevelopment projects as well as teaching. One of the underlying reasons is that its successcan be significantly improved due to the recent technical developments that allow the inquiryprocess to be supported by electronic learning environments. Inquiry-based learning is oftenorganized into inquiry phases that together form an inquiry cycle. However, different variationson what is called the inquiry cycle can be found throughout the literature. The currentarticle focuses on identifying and summarizing the core features of inquiry-based learningby means of a systematic literature review and develops a synthesized inquiry cyclethat combines the strengths of existing inquiry-based learning frameworks. The review wasconducted using the EBSCO host Library; a total of 32 articles describing inquiry phasesor whole inquiry cycles were selected based on specific search criteria. An analysis of thearticles resulted in the identification of five distinct general inquiry phases: Orientation,Conceptualization, Investigation, Conclusion, and Discussion. Some of these phases are dividedinto sub-phases. In particular, the Conceptualization phase is divided into two (alternative)sub-phases, Questioning and Hypothesis Generation; the Investigation phase is dividedinto three sub-phases, Exploration or Experimentation leading to Data Interpretation; andthe Discussion phase is divided into two sub-phases, Reflection and Communication. Noframework bringing together all of these phases and sub-phases was found in the literature.Thus, a synthesized framework was developed to describe an inquiry cycle in whichall of these phases and sub-phases would be present. In this framework, inquiry-based learningbegins with Orientation and flows through Conceptualization to Investigation, whereseveral cycles are possible. Inquiry-based learning usually ends with the Conclusion phase.The Discussion phase (which includes Communication and Reflection) is potentially presentat every point during inquiry-based learning and connects to all the other phases, becauseit can occur at any time during (discussion in-action) or after inquiry-based learning whenlooking back (discussion on-action)

Identifying potential types of guidance for supporting student inquiry when using virtual and remote labs in science: a literature review

The aim of this review is to identify specific types of guidance for supporting student use of online labs, that is, virtual and remote labs, in an inquiry context. To do so, we reviewed the literature on providing guidance within computer supported inquiry learning (CoSIL) environments in science education and classified all identified guidance according to a recent taxonomy of types of guidance. In addition, we classified the types of guidance in phases of inquiry. Moreover, we examined whether the types of guidance identified for each inquiry phase were found to be effective in promoting student learning, as documented in the CoSIL research. This review identifies what types of effective guidance currently exist and can be applied in developing future CoSIL environments, especially CoSIL environments with online labs. It also highlights the needs/shortcomings of these available types of guidance. Such information is crucial for the design and development of future CoSIL environments with online lab