Engineering education is a combination of theory and practice. The practical education is mostly given to students by engineering laboratory hours, by projects and rarely by ICT tools. Engineering laboratories may be hands-on labs with real instruments, simulated or virtual labs; remote or distributed learning labs or a mixture of all above.The need to increase the integration of digital interactive learning resources to pedagogic strategy has been clearly established at European level: the EU-wide framework for education and training includes the priority, “improving the quality and efficiency of education and training”, and the HEI Modernization Agenda, recommendation 11 states, “HEIs should support their teachers so they develop the skills for online and other forms of teaching and learning opened up by the digital era”. There are wide benefits for investments in the uptake of technology in education, on the student side. By engaging with more complex digital learning platforms in the classroom and beyond, students will be better placed to become productive, innovative employees or entrepreneurs. The aim of ESCOLA is to develop a new supportive digital learning environment for engineering laboratory classes that will help students to understand and evaluate engineering applications in practice. This learning environment will be introduced to teachers who use engineering labs for their courses, so that they can efficiently improve the quality of learning experience for students with the help of visual and interactive tools. The environment will be based on an extensive desk study and research based on available sources, assessment of them from pedagogical and technological viewpoints, a capacity analysis to understand the backgroud and needs of the users and a well-defined methodology constructed by the framework. The designed and launched learning environment will be presented by learning activities, multiplier events and piloting sessions, the feedback deriven from the end-users and beneficiaries will be considered and necessary updates will be made on the beta version. The project will be carried out by a balanced consortium of 7 partners from Turkey, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland, Poland, The Netherlands, and Spain including universities, research institutions, SMEs and foundations. All partners have valuable networks, access to dissemination platforms and relations with higher education institutes in their region so that the realisation and dissemination of project results will be facilitated. In the long term, the ESCOLA learning environment will be more adopted as a strategy for course development by the lecturers, laboratory experts and university administrations. It is obvious that in the future the outcomes of this project may also be extended to other subjects or to other target groups such as VET or other technical education training programmes.
Engineering education is a combination of theory and practice. The practical education is mostly given to students by engineering laboratory hours, by projects and rarely by ICT tools. Engineering laboratories may be hands-on labs with real instruments, simulated or virtual labs; remote or distributed learning labs or a mixture of all above.The need to increase the integration of digital interactive learning resources to pedagogic strategy has been clearly established at European level: the EU-wide framework for education and training includes the priority, “improving the quality and efficiency of education and training”, and the HEI Modernization Agenda, recommendation 11 states, “HEIs should support their teachers so they develop the skills for online and other forms of teaching and learning opened up by the digital era”. There are wide benefits for investments in the uptake of technology in education, on the student side. By engaging with more complex digital learning platforms in the classroom and beyond, students will be better placed to become productive, innovative employees or entrepreneurs. The aim of ESCOLA is to develop a new supportive digital learning environment for engineering laboratory classes to help students to understand and evaluate engineering applications in practice. This learning environment is designed and introduced for engineering teachers who use laboratories for their courses, so that they can efficiently improve the quality of learning experience for students with the help of visual and interactive tools. The environment is based on an extensive desk study and research based on available sources, assessment of them from pedagogical and technological viewpoints, a needs/capacity analysis to understand the background and needs of the users and a well-defined methodology constructed by the framework. The designed and launched learning environment is presented by learning activities, multiplier events and piloting sessions, the feedback driven from the end-users and beneficiaries were considered and necessary updates were made on the beta version. The project is carried out by a balanced consortium of 7 partners from Turkey, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland, Poland, The Netherlands, and Spain including universities, research institutions, SMEs and foundations. All partners have valuable networks, access to dissemination platforms and relations with higher education institutes in their region so that the realisation and dissemination of project results were facilitated. In the long term, the ESCOLA learning environment will be more adopted as a strategy for course development by the lecturers, laboratory experts and university administrations. It is obvious that in the future the outcomes of this project may also be extended to other subjects, education levels or to other target groups such as VET or other technical education training programmes.