Identifying key features of digital elements used during online science practicals

Abstract

As in everyday life, we use more digital elements as part of formal and informal education. To serve their educational purpose well, systematic research is desirable on identifying and measuring their characteristics. This study focuses on science practicals, which are complex and vary in organizational settings and specific arrangements, including usage of digital elements. We describe digital resources on which teaching online science practicals during COVID-19 forced lockdowns were built. We identified their key characteristics, as part of the Erasmus+ project ‘My Home – My Science Lab’, where science teachers in Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, France, and Spain shared web resources they used and would recommend and why. We recorded 89 inputs representing 50 unique web resources. Teachers preferred free web resources, mostly for knowledge revision, and newly discovered half of them due to forced distant teaching. The best evaluated resources were those supporting interaction (especially among peers), focused on teaching subjects and/or ICT, ready to use, and with a clear structure. The web resource most frequently mentioned and used in all countries was PhET (Interactive Simulations for Science and Math) providing free science principles simulations. Other characteristics mentioned in the literature (eg., supporting creativity and independent solving, connecting different levels of organization, authenticity, flexibility) were not that important for the overall rating.