Next-Lab intends to change the educational landscape of science and technology education in Europe (and beyond) on a very large scale. It does so by providing an ecosystem, the Go-Lab ecosystem, that offers a unique and extensive collection of interactive online (virtual and remote) laboratories in science and engineering domains. With the help of the Go-Lab ecosystem, teachers can find and select suitable online labs and can straightforwardly and efficiently combine these labs with dedicated support tools (learning apps) and multimedia material to form open, cloud-based, shareable educational resources with an embedded pedagogical structure. Such a resource is called an Inquiry Learning Space (ILS). The pedagogical approach that characterizes an ILS is guided inquiry learning, which means that students learn in a self-directed, though supported, way, by performing investigations with online laboratories. The Go-Lab ecosystem is accompanied by an extensive support system.
The Go-Lab sharing platform (www.golabz.eu) offers teachers a choice of more than 600 online laboratories from all over the world. The great majority of the labs (> 350) are from the domain of physics, with chemistry (close to 100) as the second most frequently represented domain. Biology, astronomy, environment, geography, mathematics, and technology each have roughly between 30-50 labs. Close to 550 labs are characterized as virtual labs, around 55 are remote labs, and close to 20 are typified as data sets. Many labs are offered in more than one language. The Go-Lab sharing platform also offers a large set of learning tools (apps) that cover all phases of an inquiry learning cycle, from orientation through conceptualization, investigation, drawing conclusions, and discussion. Two examples are an app that helps the student to formulate testable hypotheses and an app that helps the student to design informative experiments. There is also an extensive set of apps that, based in learning analytics, help the students to reflect on their inquiry process. Go-Lab ILS can also run in a collaborative mode with sharing of apps and labs between students and a chat for communication. A specific app helps students to give each other peer feedback.
The Go-Lab authoring and learning platform (Graasp; graasp.eu) supports teachers in combining labs, apps, and other (multimedia) material into Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) they can (easily and directly) offer to their students. This platform also facilitates co-creation of ILSs by teams of teachers. A total of > 1100 ILSs have been published and shared at the Go-Lab sharing platform (www.golabz.eu). The Go-Lab sharing platform offers teachers the possibility of copying published ILSs and adapting them for use with their own students.
The Go-Lab sharing platform currently hosts up to over 20,000 sessions per month; for the authoring platform the number of sessions is close to 15,000 each month. The authoring and learning platform has close to 37,000 registrations. These numbers have shown a steady increase over the course of the Next-Lab project. Go-Lab is a state-of-the-art ecosystem, fully equipped for the requirements of the GDPR and technically shaped for sustainability. Go-Lab is also prepared for new pedagogical developments (such as flip-the-classroom scenarios that require teacher learning analytics features). In Next-Lab, the ecosystem’s reach is extended from secondary education to primary education, but it can also be extended to higher education, vocational training, and lifelong learning.
