Welcome to the final Go-Lab newsletter of this year. A year that we never had expected to be like it turned out to be, with also large consequences for our educational system...
Dear Go-Lab teachers,
Very welcome to the final Go-Lab newsletter of this year. A year that we never had expected to be like it turned out to be, with also large consequences for our educational system. It has been sometimes also privately, if you have had relatives affected by COVID-19, a difficult year. In Twente we also had the sad news that one of our Go-Lab software engineers, Anjo Anjewierden passed away unexpectedly in November. Anjo was a Go-Lab pioneer and he developed many labs and apps. Let’s all hope that 2021 will be a much better year! In this newsletter we will update you with the latest Go-Lab developments.
Go-Lab Usage
Due to the lockdowns, much teaching moved online which contributed to the fact that the usage of Go-Lab has increased dramatically. As of March this year, the number of monthly sessions on Golabz has more than doubled reaching a peak in November 2020 with more than 45,000 sessions in one month. We are happy that with Go-Lab we can help teachers in transforming their teaching to online versions. If you are interested in usage data of Go-Lab and an analysis of design behavior of teachers, we have a paper in press in the journal ETR&D that will appear online soon. Data in the paper were analyzed until 2020, so still before the crisis. Another paper with data analytics on Go-Lab was published in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, you can find that paper here.
Apps
In the past few months there has been much work on the apps, improving and extending existing apps and also working on new apps.
The Quest app has a new feature, which allows you to export the individual responses of the students on the questionnaire to a csv file. To download the data, in Graasp just click on the export icon in the toolbar on the left.
The Name the Frame app is now also integrated with the Viewer (used by the students to view the content they have created in other apps) and the App Overview (used by the teachers to view what the students have done in different apps). Showing the content in the Viewer automatically works for new ILS’s, but for older ones the student has to open the Name the Frame app again before accessing the Viewer.
Soon we will have a new Table tool and Data viewer (under new names, still to be decided). Both new apps give many extended functions compared to the current apps, they are better interconnected (you can directly read data from the Table tool in the Data viewer), and there is a direct connection to the Experiment Design Tool. You may experience the new features in this demo ILS. Both apps will be premium apps.
The Shared Wiki app has been reimplemented and now follows the general user interface of the other apps/ A more extended version of this app with the name Collaborative Text Editor has been published. This app, that soon will be a premium app, offers, for example, the possibility to let students work in predefined groups with the use of the Collaboration tool.
Did you know that if you place a 360/ VR-video from YouTube in your ILS in the Video app, you get all the functions to move in 360 in the video like on YouTube? It can be a nice addition to an ILS. If your students can also make use of 360 glasses like an Oculus Device you also directly enter the 360/ VR world!
Graasp
Visualizing interactions within learning spaces on Graasp can offer valuable insights for teachers, helping them understand how, when, where, and by whom activities are carried out. In September 2020, the Graasp team launched a revamped analytics dashboard providing teachers—and other space members—with charts highlighting these interactions.
The dashboard is accessible through the pie chart icon in the top bar of any space (regular space, activities or ILSs). You can select to see the actions in the Compose view (also known as the authoring view) or in the Perform view (also known as the standalone or page view). This overarching dashboard is a complement to Learning Analytics apps that can be integrated within ILSs to provide learners with support for awareness and reflection.
By default, only the co-owner(s) of a space or an activity can see their dashboard. Editors or viewers can be authorized to see the dashboard through a new popup in the settings tab. For large spaces, only a subset of the data is displayed. The full data set can be downloaded for further analysis by clicking on the corresponding icon. Following GDPR, the owner of a space is fully responsible of its associated data set.
A nonprofit association (graasp.org) has been created to promote the usage of Graasp beyond inquiry learning with online labs. Following its usage during the COVID-19 confinement in spring 2020, the State of Geneva in Switzerland has signed an agreement with the Association to offer Graasp to 3’000 primary school teachers for supporting their blended learning activities in various disciplines. The Association is currently developing a mobile player for Graasp spaces that should be released mid 2021.
Labs
As of January first 2021, Flash it not supported anymore, which means that all Flash based labs on Golabz become inactive. Luckily, we are currently adding two new and exciting large sets of new labs. The first one is a set of labs designed by Andrew Duffy. These physics labs cover a wide series of topics and form a very interesting extension to the Go-Lab set of labs. The second set of labs was designed in Greek by Sitsanlis Ilias and also covers an extensive set of physics topics. This set of labs is being translated from Greek to English and will be gradually added to Golabz. The latter set is also brought under the Go-Lab infrastructure so that these labs can be translated in all languages. If you like to see one of these labs in another language than Greek or English, pls let us know so that the translation can be done.
The Go-Lab team wishes, you a peaceful and healthy Christmas. Let’s all trust that 2021 brings us better times.
Diana Dikke, Denis Gillet, and Ton de Jong
Go-Lab coordinating team
