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.
Through the LaSciL project we wanted to achieve the following: 1. Incorporate scientific expertise in schools’ distance learning programmes and train science teachers in order to enhance their digital competencies and readiness. 2. Offer a series of high quality digital tools and services to science teachers in order to support their distance learning practices. This includes the use of online robotic observatories with which students could make their own astronomical observations. 3. Produce a set of high quality educational resources, tailored to the science curricula, which can be used, reused and adapted to the needs of science teachers. 4. Assess the impact of the proposed approach and select best practices which provide a new paradigm in the implementation of connecting schools with research infrastructures to support science teaching and learning in the Covid 19 era.
This project was a response to the global pandemic of Covid 19 which reshaped the landscape of formal education worldwide. With a sudden shift to online and distance learning, it was clear that teachers were not prepared for this. We wanted to enhance teachers’ digital preparedness and competences, to support high quality science teaching in situ and from a distance, and support a long term organizational restructuring of schools. Some of the challenges for teachers are that they lacked the knowledge, training or resources to keep students motivated when learning was in a virtual environment; they had to ensure that the learning objectives were still met; they had to adapt their educational practice accordingly, giving a more inclusive and personalized approach for the needs of the different learners. There was a need therefore for a project which would help teachers address these challenges by empowering and supporting them to become literate and fluent in the use of high quality digital tools and showing them how they could create their own educational resources for their students in open and distance learning environments. The LaSciL project brought together people in relevant areas to address these needs.