Guided inquiry with online labs – a participatory design experience

(a discussion style, participatory design, interactive event)

1. Event topic

Nowadays there is a large consensus that inquiry based approaches to learning science incorporating students’ active investigation and experimentation are necessary to motivate students for science and that, therefore, inquiry should be part of the curriculum also because inquiry skills have a value on their own. Inquiry is the process in which students are engaged in scientifically oriented questions, perform active experimentation, formulate explanations from evidence, evaluate their explanations in light of alternative explanations, and communicate and justify their proposed explanations. There is also accumulating scientific evidence that inquiry leads to better acquisition of domain (conceptual) knowledge.

Contemporary Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) approaches to science learning provide students with ample opportunities for inquiry. TEL environments that offer simulations, games, data sets, and/or remote and virtual laboratories are significant in this respect. In these environments technological affordances are directly used for pedagogical purposes in that inquiry calls for non-linear, manipulable, and interactive content which technology is able to offer. Large-scale studies show that TEL inquiry environments provide students with genuinely effective learning opportunities. These promising results, however, only hold when the inquiry process is structured and scaffolded. Scaffolds thus play a pivotal role in inquiry learning. Scaffolds come in many kinds. Examples are tools to create hypothesis, data analysis tools, and tools to save and monitor experiments.

The Go-Lab project focuses on designing learning environments around (combined) remote and virtual (online) labs and integrates them with supportive structure and scaffolds (guidance). The topic of the interactive event is the design of guidance for inquiry learning with online laboratories.

2. The Go-Lab project

The Go-Lab project (http://www.go-lab-project.eu/) aims to enable the integration of inquiry-based learning approaches into the use of online labs for science education. The Go-Lab project opens up remote science laboratories, data archives, and virtual models (“online labs”) for large-scale use in education. Go-Lab enables science inquiry-based learning that promotes acquisition of deep conceptual domain knowledge and inquiry skills and directs students to careers in science.

For students (10 to 18-years old), Go-lab offers the opportunity to perform personalized scientific experiments with online labs in pedagogically structured learning spaces that are extended with social communication facilities. Currently the project has developed mock-ups and prototypes that will play a central role in this interactive event. In Go-Lab learning environment students are guided through an inquiry cycle and they receive guidance (e.g., in the form of heuristics, scaffolds, etc.) in each of the phases of the inquiry cycle. As an example laboratory we will use an available combined remote and virtual lab on Archimedes’ principle. The labs consist of an aquarium in which different objects can be dropped.

3. Schedule of the event

The interactive event starts with a brief introduction of inquiry learning with online labs, its advantages and issues and then introduces the Go-Lab didactical approach by means of the mock-up and prototype learning environment. Participants will have on-line access to the mock-up and prototype. Next we will move to a phase of participatory design. Participants are grouped into groups of 3-4 and first have to decide on a virtual learner (i.e. persona). For this they receive a structured form on which several characteristics of this learner can be filled in. After this, the group gets access to the on-line mock-up of the (aquarium) learning environment in which they can walk through the different phases of the inquiry cycle and inspect the guidance (prompts, heuristics, scaffolds) that is offered. They can use “sticky notes” in the online mock-up to insert their comments. After this the groups convene, the discussant will present his main comments on the Go-Lab learning environment and this will then be compared to the comments given in the sticky notes by the different groups.

Approximate time schedule:

• Introduction to inquiry learning with on-line labs and the Go-Lab project – Ton de Jong – 30 minutes
• Brief comments and interaction with the audience – Marcus Specht – 30 minutes
• Introduction to the participatory part – Ton de Jong – 15 minutes
• Participatory design activity – participants – 45 minutes
• Exchange of results, general discussion and conclusion – all participants – 45 minutes

4. Interactive event organizers

The interactive event is organized by Ton de Jong (University of Twente, the Netherlands). Ton de Jong is professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Twente. He specializes in inquiry learning (mainly in science learning) supported by technology. He was project manager of several EC projects and several national projects including the ZAP project in which interactive simulations for psychology were developed. ZAPs are sold worldwide. For ZAP and SimQuest he has won a number of international prizes. He published over 100 journal articles and book chapters and is on the editorial board of seven ISI journals. He published a paper in Science (2006) on inquiry learning with computer simulations and in Science (2013) on learning with virtual and physical laboratories. In 2013 he won the Inquiry based Instruction award from Science for one of the missions of the SCY project that he coordinated. Currently he is coordinator of the EC Go-Lab project (www.go-lab-project.eu).

Ton de Jong, University of Twente, the Netherlands, Department of Instructional Technology, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences. Email: [email protected].

The discussant, and co-organizer, is Marcus Specht (Open University, the Netherlands). Marcus Specht is Professor for Advanced Learning Technologies at the Open University of the Netherlands and currently heading the CELSTEC Learning Technology Labs. He is involved in several national and international research projects on open educational content, competence based life-long learning, personalized information support and contextualized systems. Marcus Specht specializes in Mobile and Contextualized Learning Technologies, Learning Network Services, and Social and Immersive Media for Learning. He is currently coordinator of the weSPOT project. weSPOT aims at propagating scientific inquiry as the approach for science learning and teaching by making use of mobile technologies and learning analytics support. Marcus is member of the Go-Lab advisory committee.

Marcus Specht, Open University, The Netherlands, CELSTEC - Centre for Learning Sciences & Technologies. Email: [email protected].

5. Prospective members of the interactive event program committee

Members, next to the organizers, are: Denis Gillet (EPFL, Geneva, Switzerland) and Marcia Linn (University of Berkeley).

6. Expected number of attendees and the planned length of the interactive event

The duration of the interactive event is ½ day. The maximum number of participants, to allow for a close interaction, is approximately 15. Participants should bring laptops to allow for on-line access to the mock-ups and the prototypes of the Go-Lab learning environment and remote labs.