The first year of the "open discovery of stem laboratories" (ODL) project

Abstract

The Open Discovery of STEM Laboratories (ODL) project, co-funded by the European Community Erasmus+ KA2 program for 30 months, starting from November 2015, involves five countries: Spain, Italy, Greece, Estonia and Lithuania. It aims to implement teacher collaboration in creating and using μMOOCs (very short version of MOOCs-Massive Open Online Courses) for encouraging the use of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) remote/virtual laboratories into lessons. The challenge of the project is to impact on teaching process and inspire pedagogical innovation and modernization by means of open education resources, teaching/learning tools and best practices provided by European educators via the ODL platform. The ODL project consists of different phases: the setting up of the pedagogical scenarios for the design and creation of the μMOOCs, their embedding in school environments and their dissemination to a wide EU audience. The strong points of the project rely on the opportunity for teachers of improving both digital skills and pedagogical competences, experiencing international collaborative work and having the availability of attractive open education resources in national languages, helpful to design creative lessons on STEM topics. In this contribution we present the ODL project and the results obtained in the first year of its activity. In particular, we discuss the difficulty to identify the pedagogical scenarios to be adopted to create suitable μMOOCs for physics education, able to increase student ability to solve real-life problems. The benefits of adopting inquiry-based approaches, differentiated by the amount of information and teacher guidance provided to students (confirmation, structured/guided and elicited/open inquiry), will be discussed and compared.