ADLES’s overall aim is to improve the quality of education by providing more motivating, stimulating and effective learning contexts to better prepare students for their future academic and professional life by allowing them to actively develop required personal and social competences. The consortium will work with and prepare teachers to implement active learning methodologies based on PBL (Project/Problem) scaffolded by a set of digital tools (games, simulations and communication) that will allow students to experiment, collaborate and communicate in an extended and multinational learning community. The project will mainly address STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects therefore tackling underachievement in those areas.
The project will develop strategies to integrate new and innovative learning methods ensuring better prepared, active, autonomous, self-relying, innovating and risk-taking students; to foster best-practice and expertise exchange between partners; to develop new and innovative ways of using ICT in education and, in particular, to find new ways to motivate students, to give them competencies in creativity and innovation, to reinforce problem solving, to develop teamwork and collaboration skills and, overall, to improve the efficiency of the school education.
As concrete results, the project will produce:
– A validated active learning methodology using Project/Problem-Based Learning for secondary and vocational schools;
– An online PBL platform that supports that methodology through the production, storage, share and reuse of problems and challenges to be used. The platform will also organize the process of setting up a PBL process by guiding the teachers through all the stages of the methodology and will allow a multinational collaborative problem-solving process;
– A set of 36 problems based on simulations and games integrated in the platform with the corresponding pedagogical guidelines that demonstrate how to use the PBL platform. These problems will be configurable and customizable, for instance to reflect real situations. The consortium will produce 12 of these problems and then involved teachers and students will create at least 24 other challenges;
– A set of training actions motivating and preparing teachers for the implementation of PBL through the ADLES platform;
– A set of guidelines and a checklist that schools can use to systematically apply Active Learning in their courses.
As a complement the project will produce several management and dissemination elements (reports, posters, flyers, web site, conference articles, newsletters, etc.) that will also disseminate information about Active Learning and Problem/Project based Learning.