Repository of Open Educational Resources for Laboratory Support in Engineering and Natural Science Erasmus Project

Project Title

Repository of Open Educational Resources for Laboratory Support in Engineering and Natural Science

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; Open and distance learning; Quality and Relevance of Higher Education in Partner Countries

Project Summary

The current epidemiological situation around the globe has influenced that universities predominantly conduct their teaching process via Internet. Laboratory teaching is reduced and conducts under health preventive protocols. Partly, universities use WEB-Laboratories (WLs), also. Due to objective circumstances, students are mainly focused on theoretical outcomes of their studies. The subject of this project are fields (chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, technical and engineering sciences) where laboratory work is an absolutely unavoidable and it is very important for understanding and applying the theoretical outcomes of knowledge

Proper insight into experimental phenomena and real laboratory experience (according to the world principle of teaching and learning “mind and hand”), allows students to correctly and faster understand educational goals and theoretical concepts, understand the relationship between reality and theory, acquire professional skills, develop analytical skills, and a high level of knowledge absorption during the teaching process. Laboratory work requires the engagement of great resources (equipment maintenance costs, competent human resources, relevant laboratory infrastructure). In order to reduce the effective costs of an equiped laboratory place per student and provide a relevant level of laboratory support to the teaching process – different universities have integrated their laboratory resources through strategic partnerships in building of joint or open WLs (see Golabz repository https://www.golabz.eu). It is possible to access ta a WL from anywhere at any time, but with only one hardware user at the same time. The existing capacities of the WLs around globe are not enough for a huge number of students, who are oriented to this approach due to the “COVID-19 – crisis”.

It is necessary to increase the number of WLs or to apply some other innovative approaches – in order to solve the needs of the laboratory side of teaching.

The proponents of this project believe that for all levels of education, and society as a whole, it is useful to establish and build an open repository of very short and effective video illustrations of experimental phenomena with educational orientation. Such a repository would be a significant resource for digital education (online teaching contents, digital textbooks, support in conventional and blended teaching and learning).

The subject of this project is a strategic partnership among project participants to support digital education and laboratory teaching. An innovative concept of creating a joint repository of short video contents of representative experiments for educational purposes is proposed. First of all, the goal of the project is to establish mechanisms and standards for

– quality of production of open resources of digital education, as well as for their publication in joint digital repositories, which should include considerations on

concepts of search and categorization of open educational resources, but also another innovative component of this project related to

– software organization of digital copies of experimental realizations or a “digital twin” of an experiment designed for educational purposes.

By “digital twin” of a real experiment – we mean a programmable digital reproduction of an already realized experiment, where for the selected inputs activates the “execution” of the corresponding measured experimental results with accompanying videos and other monitoring of the experimental realization. The user can select combinations of specific inputs that will activate the execution of already performed experiments for those inputs. The video and diagram presentation of an experiment execution should be adapted to the educational purpose and established project standards.

In this way, it is possible to simultaneously activate an unlimited number of digital copies of experimental realizations, which can very successfully replace certain types of WLs, as well as experiments which were not organized through a WL. The obvious advantages of this approach are in attainability, and possibilities of efficient use and maintenance costs.

This approach is not effective when the goal of laboratory work is to program specialized hardware or verify research results. Therefore, the goals of this project include the generation of instructions for the construction of two WLs for programming and application of specialized hardware (FPGA and Arduino platform).

The project should encourage, enable and regulate the creation of new digital educational resources, their selection and publication in a joint open repository, as well as a creation of new WLs. Exemplary initial contents will be offered by this project in all relevant fields, as well as instructions and tutorials for their production. The strategic partnership of institutions on building a repository of open educational resources will be based on the development of relevant mechanisms

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 143295 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERZITET U KRAGUJEVCU & Country: RS

Project Partners

• UNIVERZITET U BEOGRADU
• UNIVERZITET SINGIDUNUM
• Cognipix d.o.o. Beograd
• TARTU ULIKOOL
• UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACION A DISTANCIA