Go-Lab stands for Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School.

The Go-Lab Project opens up remote and virtual science labs for the large-scale use in education. Its technical framework offers students the opportunity to perform personalized scientific experiments with online labs, whereas teachers may enrich their classroom activities with demonstrations and disseminate best practices in a web-based pedagogic community. The overall aim of the Go-Lab Project is to provide students an opportunity to gain hands-on experience in science by conducting experiments using modern laboratory equipment by themselves, deepen their knowledge in fundamental sciences, and to motivate them for making scientific carrier in the future.

Students may get an access to scientific instruments and use them for their investigations by undertaking active guided experimentation carried out on top-level scientific facilities we offer. They may also access research data and archives, use advanced tools for data acquisition and analysis, as well as facilities and support communication on scientific topics.

Teachers may integrate live demonstrations and experiments conducted with remote and virtual labs in their regular classroom activities providing students with the necessary support for their inquiry process and adapting this experience to particular learning situation. Further, teachers may share their best practices and methodologies as well as provide and get support in a pedagogic community.

Lab-owners (scientific organizations, universities, research institutions or commercial companies) may bring real experiments into the web and create a virtual community stimulating dialog between scientists, instructors, students, and other stakeholders, thus, increasing visibility and attraction of their labs. This innovative approach will also bring scientific experiments at a new level allowing conducting remote studies in international teams.

Inquiry is the process in which students are engaged in scientifically oriented questions, perform active experimentation, formulate explanations from evidence, evaluate their explanations in sense of alternative explanations, and communicate and justify their proposed explanations.

The online labs aim at supporting inquiry learning and providing the possibility to conduct scientific experiments in a virtual environment. Online laboratories can be of two kinds. Remotely-operated educational labs (remote labs) provide students an opportunity to collect data from a real physical laboratory setup, including real equipment, from remote locations. As an alternative there are virtual labs that simulate the real equipment. Remote and virtual labs both have specific advantages for learning and can be combined to support specific learning activities.

The inquiry process should be well structured and scaffold to achieve optimal learning results. Scaffolding refers to support (dedicated software tools) that helps students with tasks that they cannot complete on their own. For example, they can help students to create hypotheses, design experiments, make predictions, formulate interpretations of the data, reflect upon the learning process, plan and structure their work, and monitor what has been done.

In the first project year, the Go-Lab Project offers Visionary Workshops for teachers providing information about the project and available online laboratories (including hands-on sessions). During the workshops pedagogic scenarios are worked out to be used by the teachers in their everyday practice. The workshops also aim at collecting feedback from the community of practice and integrating the requirements in the Go-Lab infrastructure.

In the second and third project years, Practice Reflection Workshops will be offered concentrating on concrete learning scenarios and on drawing lessons from the experience of integrating the use of online laboratories in school practice. In the fourth project year, Summative Workshops evaluating implemented scenarios and collecting best practices will be conducted.