Fostering online scientific experimentations in universities and high schools: The EDOC project

The educational context is experiencing in the last years a decisive shift towards novel pedagogical trends aimed at improving both learning quality and teaching methodologies. Online scientific experimentations represent one of these new paths. Indeed, they promise to combine the educational benefits from "learning-by-doing" approaches, which foster a deeper understanding in theoretical concepts, with the advantages offered by online resources, which do not suffer from typical logistic, safety and cost issues of hands-on laboratories. In this paper, we present an overview concerning two research projects about remote laboratories and mobile crowdsensing that are currently under development and testing at our university in Southern Italy, by specifically emphasizing their collaborative nature and the achievable pedagogical outcomes. Such activities belong to a nation-wide research and development project approved by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research promoting the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies both in high-schools and universities. These experiences, along with first results from their prototypal deployment in real use-case scenarios at pilot schools, also provide useful insights to define trial tests on a larger scale and to engage larger amounts of students.