Go-Lab brings the use of online and remote laboratories in the classrooms. The main focus is in providing students with laboratory experience and helping teachers to enrich their lessons.
The timeline of the project: a duration of 4 years and 2015-2016 (or Phase C) is the last year of the project. It is supported by 19 partners in 11 eleven countries.
Go-Lab brings the use of online and remote laboratories in the classrooms. The main focus is in providing students with laboratory experience and helping teachers to enrich their lessons.
The timeline of the project: a duration of 4 years and 2015-2016 (or Phase C) is the last year of the project. It is supported by 19 partners in 11 eleven countries.
Inquiry is an approach to the learning activity including exploration, asking questions, and discovering new solutions and understandings of scientific problems.
The process of Inquiry learning consists of several learning phases such as orientation, conceptualisation, investigation, discussion, and conclusion (see above). It also needs an effective learning environment: teachers' guidance, scientific experimentation settings, as well as learning resources and instructions.
In Go-Lab, teachers can create Inquiry Learning Spaces to provide necessary learning resources, tools, and guidance to their students, in order to support them in conducting personalised scientific experiments.
Scaffolding refers to support (dedicated software tools) that helps students with tasks that they cannot complete on their own. For example, they can help students to create hypotheses, design experiments, make predictions, and formulate interpretations of the data. In Go-Lab, you can have
LABS (2 types: remotely-operated laboratories or virtual labs that simulate the real equipment) and
APPS (small web based software applications supporting specific learning or teaching goals and tasks in online labs. Apps can be added to a Inquiry Learning Space together with online labs) An example of an app above, which tracks the time spent by a student in a certain phase of the inquiry learning cycle.
Three components:
Go-Lab Repository: search and explore online labs, apps and inquiry learning spaces;
Authoring platform (called Graasp): where you create and edit Inquiry Learning Spaces (abv. ILSs)
Tutoring platform: offers various support in the form online video tutorials, discussions with experts and sharing and Q&As with other teachers on the project forum.
International countries: high number of requests to join from teachers outside of the 15 official project countries which led to the development of an international community of teachers.
In these workshops teachers and other stakeholders contribute to the development of the Go-Lab portal and its components.
The winners of the Go-Lab competition have the opportunity to participate in a week long summer school.
- Teachers expressed their enthusiasm about the features of the Go-Lab but they still have their concerns in order to use it more often in their teaching practice.
Many teachers expressed their willingness to create their own ILSs and share them with other teachers.
Many teachers reported that they don’t have enough time to learn how to use the Go-Lab by themselves and they prefer to attend more workshops.
Students were very excited with Go-Lab and they completed all the activities of the ILS.
They were able to use the tools in the ILS, despite the fact that in some cases they encountered problems and difficulties.
The majority of the students agreed that they enjoyed the lesson and that using Go-Lab was a pleasant experience for them.
Some students suggested that they would be willing to use the Go-Lab again in their future lessons.