Large Scientific Infrastructures enriching online and digital Learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

Large Scientific Infrastructures enriching online and digital Learning

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Natural sciences; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development)

Project Summary

The pandemic crisis has reshaped the landscape of formal education worldwide.While the necessary shift to online and distance learning was made quickly, the majority of teachers were hardly prepared for it. Teachers had not only to be fluent in the use of ICT including online communication platforms and learning management systems, but also had to face a new school reality, that of the virtual classroom. Some of the main challenges that teachers had to face were:

-to keep students motivated to actively engage in the virtual classroom, even in cases where the national authorities decreed that there would be no school exams at the end of the year.

– to make sure that the learning outcomes of their lessons were achieved.

-to adapt their educational practice accordingly following a more inclusive and personalized approach in order to address different types of learners.

Adding to these, science teachers had to find creative ways to organize and implement laboratory work from a distance, utilizing in some cases simple materials to demonstrate experiments from their camera or browsing the web to find appropriate high quality digital tools and resources in order to support their practice. Last but not least, the desired goal of increasing students’ science motivation and fascination and attracting them to science careers, through the implementation of project based learning activities was put in a stalemate due to the Covid19 crisis.

In order to answer to the challenges faced by the teachers and schools overall, the proposed project brings together actors in the field of scientific research, operators of large scientific infrastructures, education and outreach specialists and school education experts in order to enhance teachers’ digital preparedness and competences, to support high quality science teaching in situ and from a distance as well as support a long term organizational restructuring of schools.

LaSciL envisions to empower and support teachers to become literate and fluent with the use of high quality digital tools; they will able to create their own open educational resources for use of their students in open and distance learning; they will able to manage large numbers of students in an online environment, keeping them motivated to participate, maintaining or enhancing their science motivation and personalizing their teaching practices based on the needs of their students. To achieve that, LaSciL will demonstrate innovative ways to involve teachers and students in eScience (O1) by sharing and exploiting the collective power of high quality digital resources (research facilities, scientific instruments, advanced ICT tools, simulation and visualisation applications and scientific databases; O2). It will provide teachers cutting edge, curriculum-tailored educational scenarios (O3) that can be used, reused and adapted to their needs as well as act as a source of inspiration for the design of their own open educational content. Throughout careful monitoring and assessment of the teacher training and implementation with students (O4), LaSciL aims to select a series of good practices and construct a roadmap (O5) both for supporting science teachers and a for proposing a new organizational framework for the collaboration between schools and research infrastructures which will demonstrate effective ways for involving a broader set of actors in the use of research infrastructures by developing a framework of actions that will attract young people to science and pool talent to scientific careers.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 299025 Eur

Project Coordinator

The Dill Faulkes Education Trust Limited & Country: UK

Project Partners

• ELLINOGERMANIKI AGOGI SCHOLI PANAGEA SAVVA AE
• IDRYMA TECHNOLOGIAS KAI EREVNAS
• OSTERREICHISCHES WELTRAUM FORUM VEREIN
• NUCLIO NUCLEO INTERACTIVO DE ASTRONOMIA ASSOCIACAO