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

Sten Govaerts (1) , Yiwei Cao (2) , Nils Faltin (2) , Faysal Cherradi (2) , Denis Gillet (1)

1 EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2 IMC - information multimedia communication IMC AG

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.

Mots clés: Online labs; Inquiry learning; Tutoring; STEM; Social tutoring platform; Teacher professional development; Community building; Business model

Domaines: Education

Sten Govaerts, Yiwei Cao, Nils Faltin, Faysal Cherradi, Denis Gillet. Tutoring Teachers - Building an Online Tutoring Platform for the Teacher Community. Immersive Education, Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2015. ⟨hal-01206565⟩