Towards Competence-Based Learning Design Driven Remote and Virtual Labs Recommendations for Science Teachers

Abstract

Remote and virtual labs (RVLs) are widely used by science education teachers in their daily teaching practice. This has led to a plethora of RVLs that are offered with or without cost. In order to organise them and facilitate their search and findability, several RVL web-based repositories have been operated. As a result, a key open challenge is to design and implement recommender systems that support science teachers in finding and selecting appropriate RVLs based on core pedagogical elements of their learning designs and their own information and communication technology (ICT)-supported teaching competence profiles. In response to this challenge, we propose a recommender system for supporting learning design driven RVLs recommendations taking into consideration teachers' profiling elements related to the ICT-supported teaching competences for using RVLs. To achieve this, we propose an instantiation of the UNESCO ICT competency framework for teachers for the context of using RVL and capitalise on our previously proposed metadata schema for describing RVLs, which includes core elements of a learning design and teachers' required ICT-supported teaching competences. Our evaluation results based on a user study, highlight the high level of ranking accuracy of our proposed recommender system and support its capacity to facilitate science teachers in selecting appropriate RVLs.

Using educational data from teaching and learning to inform teachers’ reflective educational design in inquiry-based STEM education

“…A prime example of technologies used in this regard are online labs. Online labs, which include virtual and remote labs (Zervas et al, 2015) are utilized in STEM Inquiry-based Educational Designs (IED) given their affordances to foster more 'hands-on' learning experiences for students (de Jong et al, 2014) by operating virtual or physical equipment as well as their capacity to provide guidance to support students' engagement in the Inquiry tasks (d' Angelo et al, 2013). However, often online labs provide only a subset of the required guidance needed to facilitate students perform the required tasks throughout the Inquiry cycle (de .…”

A Review of Educational Recommender Systems for Teachers

“…(El-Bishouty et al, 2014) developed a smart e-course recommender tool to support teachers to extend their existing e-courses in learning management system by adding a list of recommended LOs to courses. (Zervas et al, 2015) proposed a recommender system to support teachers to find and select the suitable remote and visited labs based on core pedagogical elements of their learning designs and their information and communication technology competences profiles. (Tewari et al, 2015) proposed a recommender system that analyses learner's opinions about contents and recommends the teachers who have uploaded the content of the web site to modify the particular portion of the subject topic which is difficult to understand by learners using opinion mining.…”

“…are used in the process of recommendation (Sergis and Sampson, 2016). Studies like (Sergis et al, 2014b), (Zervas et al, 2015) and (Sergis and Sampson, 2016) Figure 2 show the comparative panorama between the results. Therefore, user profiling in teacher-oriented recommender systems should be an important consideration for educational recommendation systems for teachers.…”

Raim: framework para la inclusión adaptativa en entornos educativos para todos

“…Se han adelantado muchos trabajos sobre sistemas adaptativos en educación; sin embargo, aún no se han llenado las expectativas debido a problemas como la falta de esquemas genéricos de personalización [7]- [9] y de disponibilidad de contenidos educativos especializados [10] y las dificultades en la captura y actualización del perfil del estudiante [11].…”