Towards an Online Lab Portal for Inquiry-based STEM Learning at School

Sten Govaerts (1) , Yiwei Cao (2) , Andrii Voznuik (1) , Adrian Holzer (1) , Danilo Garbi Zutin (3) , Elio San Cristobal Ruiz (4) , Lars Bollen (5) , Sven Manske (6) , Nils Faltin (7) , Christophe Salzmann (1) , Eleftheria Tsourlidaki (8) , Denis Gillet (1)

1 EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2 IMC - information multimedia communication IMC AG
3 Carintha University of Applied Sciences
4 UNED - Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
5 University of Twente [Netherlands]
6 Universität Duisburg-Essen [Essen]
7 imc AG
8 Ellinogermaniki Agogi

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.

Keywords: online lab; portal; design; inquiry learning; metadata; architecture; interoperability; lab repository

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Education

Sten Govaerts, Yiwei Cao, Andrii Voznuik, Adrian Holzer, Danilo Garbi Zutin, et al.. Towards an Online Lab Portal for Inquiry-based STEM Learning at School. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2013), Oct 2013, Kenting, Taiwan. ⟨hal-00990259⟩