Nils Faltin

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.

CROKODIL: a platform for collaborative resource-based learning

On-the-job learning is primarily a personal knowledge acquisition process accomplished increasingly based on resources found on the Web. These days, collaboratively learning from and with others on the Web is taking on a very prominent position in this learning process. CROKODIL aims to provide support for collaborative learning based on web resources. In this paper, we introduce our learning scenario and an evaluation of our target group. We describe our pedagogical concepts, and present the results of an evaluation of these concepts. CROKODIL supports the semantic tagging of resources as well as the collaborative use of these resources and their information. Social networking functionalities are integrated in the platform to encourage and support collaborative learning. We also present some extensions to the base functionality of the platform, such as resource recommendations and interfaces for the integration in existing learning management systems.

Structure and Constraints in Interactive Exploratory Algorithm Learning

Traditionally an algorithm is taught by presenting and explaining the problem, the algorithm pseudocode and an algorithm animation or a sequence of static snapshots. My aim is to foster creativity, motivation and high level programming concepts by providing the student an alternative route to algorithm understanding: exploratory learning. The algorithm is structured into several functions and this structure is presented to the student. The student is encouraged to device a pseudocode description himself. An instance of the problem is presented on the level of each algorithm function. A graphical simulation of the data structures and some of the algorithm functions are provided. It is the students task to find out a correct sequence of function calls that will solve the problem instance. The instructor can control the difficulty of the task by providing algorithm constraints. Each new constraint will shrink the solution space and thus ease the task.

STEM Teachers’ Community Building Through a Social Tutoring Platform

Teachers’ knowledge and skills have a great impact on students’ learning outcomes. Teachers’ vocational training has been a research topic in technology-enhanced learning for years. The Go-Lab project aims to engage school students with STEM topics by bringing online laboratory experiments based on inquiry learning approach into the classroom. In Go-Lab, teachers’ knowledge and skills in inquiry learning with online labs are important. Thus, we have launched the Go-Lab Tutoring Platform, a social tutoring platform for teachers’ expertise sharing and community building through virtual tutoring sessions. In this paper, we present the first rollout results of the tutoring platform based on five teachers’ training events. We explore the practical activities for efficient knowledge sharing between teachers and pedagogical experts, in order to build up teachers’ community.

Time2Competence: the PROLIX project

The poster introduces PROLIX, an integrated project funded by the European Commission. PROLIX overall objective is to align learning with business processes in order to enable organisations to faster improve the competencies of their employees according to continuous changes of business requirements. To reach this goal, PROLIX is developing an open, integrated reference architecture for process-oriented learning and information exchange. The key innovation in PROLIX consists of a process- and competency driven framework for interlinking business process intelligence tools on the one hand with knowledge management and learning environments on the other.

Tutoring Teachers - Building an Online Tutoring Platform for the Teacher Community

Knowledge sharing has been a trendy and recurring topic in technology-enhanced learning for years. Many advanced platforms have been developed. However face-to-face help session are still often preferred by people who want to enhance their skills. The Go-Lab project aims to engage school students with STEM topics by bringing online laboratory experiments into the classroom. To achieve this, teachers are the key to success. Accordingly, the teacher’s knowledge and skills in inquiry learning with online labs are important, since it may be a hurdle for teachers to use such technical software and apply it in their lessons. To support and tutor teachers with this, we have developed the Go-Lab Tutoring Platform that offers teachers a peer assistance and expertise sharing platform. Teachers, lab owners, and pedagogical experts can help each other and share their skills and knowledge. To sustain this tutoring platform, we aim to set up a business model to support the community build-up in a sustainable way. This paper elaborates on the design, the first prototype and an early evaluation of the Go-Lab Tutoring Platform.

A study on the use of a metadata schema for characterizing school education STEM lessons plans by STEM teachers

Online labs (OLs) constitute digital educational tools which can have a significant role in supporting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teachers in their daily teaching practice. Designing STEM lessons supported by specific OLs is a challenging task and thus, it is useful for STEM teachers to be able to share their lesson plans in a way that these can be effectively searched by others. The most common way to facilitate this process is (a) to characterize the lesson plans with appropriately selected educational metadata and (b) to build a web repository that collects the metadata records of the lesson plans (following a common metadata schema) and offers search and retrieval functionalities. In our previous work, a metadata schema that can be used for characterizing STEM lesson plans supported by OLs has been proposed. The scope of this paper is to complement the findings of our previous work and present the technical implementation of the proposed metadata schema via a web-based repository, namely the Go-Lab repository and a study on the real usage of the metadata schema’s elements through the analysis of the lesson plans’ metadata records that have been published to this repository by STEM teachers.

Applying Business Process Oriented Learning in Industry: The PROLIX Solution Approach Based on a Case Study

With human capital being critical to corporate success, aligning individual training with business priorities, emerges as a key challenge. Business process oriented learning unites corporate training and business process management. This entails integrating learning into daily working tasks and putting in place mechanisms for the effective management of business processes, organisational roles, competencies and learning processes, to reduce the time to fill competency gaps and to build proficiency according to evolving business needs. In this paper we outline the main characteristics of the PROLIX approach for business-driven training and provide a practical example of how this concept can help a typical vehicle manufacturer effectively resolve competency related business problems stemming from changes in supply chain management.