Explorative learning with technology in STEM - The OLAREX experience

The secondary educational system should react adequate to fast technological changes in the last decade and incorporate them in an appropriate way in the learning and teaching process. The Y-generation is following these technological tendencies very fast and often uncritical. But they are good in all kind of applications of modern ICT trends. At the same time the average knowledge level in STEM subjects is in a lot of European schools inadequate to this development. One of the reasons is the higher level of abstraction needed to understand this kind of knowledge. Practical experience on real experiments can really support the learning process in this area. But a lot of secondary schools have neither the technical basis nor the access to equipped laboratories. Online labs open up opportunities for rather new teaching methods that gain an important role in educational trends. This applies to secondary school education, higher education, and industrial training. The term of online labs refers to interactive experiments that can be provided over the Internet. These labs can be divided into two groups: virtual laboratories and remote laboratories. Virtual labs are based on software simulations and often used in the field of mathematics and in particular simulations where the practical implementation is too difficult or even impossible to realize due to security reasons. In comparison to virtual labs, remote labs have real hardware and allow users to manipulate it. As laboratory equipment and instruments are becoming increasingly sophisticated and too expensive for universities to purchase or maintain, remote laboratories are a viable option. Within the scope of the OLAREX project teachers from secondary schools were invited to learn more about online labs, their functionalities and usage, and their applicability in the classroom. This paper will look at both, the experience of developers of online labs and the experience of teachers using online labs.