New Perspectives in Science Education

The main purpose of the paper is to look into the organisation of Schools Pilots in three cases and present the evolution of the internal structures  and tools used and required, ensuring not only their smooth running but also the maximum capitalisation on teachers’ experience regarding the best development of the respective projects.                                                 

The UniSchooLabS project focused on promoting the collaboration between universities and schools in the provision of remote access to science laboratories through internet-based services. A small group of 10 teachers from Greece, Italy and Austria were involved in the validation activities regarding the development of an online platform which allowed teachers and their students to work on selected inquiry based activities related to specific online laboratories. The coordination was done by the partners directly.

GLOBAL excursion introduced e-Infrastructures to educators and their pupils between 14-18 years of age. A group of 25 teachers from 5 countries (Austria, Belgium, Spain, Hungary and UK) have worked under the guidance of their 5 Pedagogical Advisors on the co-design of the Virtual Science Hub – “ViSH” and provided scientists, teachers, pupils as well as policy makers with a package of activities, materials, and tools for enabling the integration of e-Infrastructures into school curricula.

The Go-Lab Project opens up remote science laboratories and online labs for the large-scale use in education. Its technical framework – the Go-Lab Portal - offers students the opportunity to perform personalized scientific experiments with online labs, whereas teachers may enrich their classroom activities with demonstrations and disseminate best practices in a web-based pedagogic community. In the course of 4 years, Go-Lab aims to Pilot its activities to 1000 classes around Europe. In this model, we have a gradual annual expansion of the Pilot activities. In order to provide schools with the maximum support and guidance, National Coordinators are responsible for the recruitment to the project and completion of activities of their respective schools. A tailored made Dashboard tool that is made available to National Coordinators in two respective releases (2014 & 2015) allows them to monitor the status of teachers’ Go-Lab related activities. A set of statistics will also be generated and will provide National Coordinators and the whole project with insights on the overall activities of the Go-Lab participating countries and project implementation outreach.

Throughout the paper, we will look into each of the above structures and analyse the reasons that led to the evolution and the adoption of the specific organisational models. We will also look into the impact these choices have on Teachers’ experiences, on overall organisation of the validation activities but also on the collection of teachers’ feedback and the overall direction and outcome of the respective projects.