Abstract. Nowadays, the knowledge economy is growing rapidly. To sustain future growth, more well educated people in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are needed. In the Go-Lab project we aim to motivate and orient students from an early age on to study STEM fields in their future educational path by applying inquiry learning using online labs. This paper presents an inquiry learning portal where teachers can discover, use and enhance online labs appropriate for their courses and students can acquire scientific methodology skills while doing experiments using the labs. The Go-Lab portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of online labs, inquiry learning spaces and complementary services. The paper discusses a first version of the portal and our future plans.
The rapid advancements in online education have pointed to a new open learning approach using open educational resources (OER). In this approach, educators and learners can freely access or redistribute educational resources that have been released online in the public domain under an open licence. Whereas this approach looks appealing in reducing learning costs, as well as in enhancing learning quality and facilitating knowledge sharing, several challenges might hinder the adoption of OER, such as locating and selecting the most appropriate resources among the thousands that are published and that are available online, and trusting them. This paper elaborates on those challenges and suggests an emerging technologies-based perspective for addressing the efficient inclusion of OER. To this end, this paper discusses how the integration of emerging yet essential technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain, with big learning data and educational data mining algorithms could have a profound impact on enhancing OER-based learning and teaching. The dynamics of incorporating these technologies to solve several OER challenges are demonstrated through numerous examples, and the potential limitations are also discussed. The paper concludes with visions of the future, possible research challenges and directions.
Dev Camps are events that enable participants to tackle challenges using software tools and different kinds of hardware devices in collaborative project-style activities. The participants conceptualize and develop their solutions in a self-directed way, involving technical, organizational and social skills. In this sense, they are autonomous producers or "makers". The Dev Camp activity format resonates with skills such as communication, critical thinking, creativity, decision-making and planning and can be considered as a bridge between education and industry. In this paper we present and analyse our experience from a series of such events that were co-organized between an industrial partner acting as a host and several university partners. We take this as an indication to envision new opportunities for projectbased learning in more formal educational scenarios.
Currently architectures for learning analytics infrastructures are being developed in different contexts. While some approaches are designed for specific types of learning environments like learning management systems (LMS) or are restricted to specific analysis tasks, general solutions for learning analytics infrastructures are still underrepresented in current research. This paper describes the design of a flexible and extendable architecture for a learning analytics infrastructure which incorporates different analytics aspects such as data storage, feedback mechanisms, and analysis algorithms. The described infrastructure relies on loosely coupled software agents that can perform different analytics task independently. Hence, it is possible to extend the analytic functionality by just adding new agent components. Furthermore, it is possible for existing analytics systems to access data and use infrastructure components as a service. As a case study, this paper describes the application of the proposed infrastructure as part of the learning analytics services in a large scale web-based platform for inquiry-based learning with online laboratories.
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