Inspiring Science Education: eLearning tools to promote IBSE
The project Inspiring Science Education [ISE] – funded by the European Commission under the CIP-ICT-PSP programme – aims to encourage the use of eLearning tools for promoting inquiry-based science education [IBSE] across European schools.
Running from April 2013 until July 2016, the project brings together a multi-stakeholder partnership, including the European Physical Society [EPS], and aims to reach 10,000 teachers and 100,000 students in 5,000 primary and secondary schools in 14 European countries1. The project’s final goal is to make available to all European science teachers a common framework for the design, development, organisation and sharing of resources, methods and tools that promote IBSE.
The ISE project will be organised into four main lines of action:
- The ISE consortium will prepare a series of scenarios that will guide the teachers in the application of eLearning tools in innovative teaching practices that will demonstrate the potential of these tools to qualitative upgrade the current practice.
- The creation of a structured inventory of eLearning tools that will comprise, among others, interactive simulations, educational games and Virtual Reality [VR] and Augmented Reality [AR] applications developed by research organisations as well as by outreach infrastructures of universities. The repositories developed will be eventually integrated into the Open Discovery Space Portal.
- The project will run large‐scale pilots in European schools during three academic years.The implementation in each school will follow a progressive approach, with the engagement of pioneering groups of 2‐3 teachers setting up the schools road‐map to the science learning innovation and moving on with the involvement of student groups and the use of more advanced tools. The final goal is to establish, organise and support a community of teachers that will act as leaders in producing meaningful change in contexts of teaching practices and will influence policy making.
- Finally, the mainstreaming process that will help to increase the potential of the main project outcomes, making them useful at a both micro- and macro‐level of the European education systems.
Among these initiatives, the EPS will lead the integration of the proposed project’s methodology in the evolution of the European Science Education Academy [ESEA] (for more information about the ESEA initiative, see an e-EPS item on this month’s issue) in the framework of the development of the Inspiring Science Education Federation.
For more information, you can visit the ISE webpage on the EPS website.
- Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and United Kingdom. [↩]
