The University of Tartu (UTE) is the oldest and largest university in Estonia with about 18,000 students and 1,700 academic staff members. Teacher training and educational research at the University of Tartu is coordinated by Pedagogicum. The Science Education Centre of UTE has been involved in the educational research promoting scientific-technological literacy in Estonia and East-European countries as well as research projects co-founded by the European Commission, UNESCO Science Education Sector, British Council, Estonian Science Foundation, and others. The results of these projects have been distributed among teachers in Estonia and other countries, as the center has direct connections to the local and international teacher organizations.
In Go-Lab project, UTE is represented by the Learning Design Workgroup of the university (UTE-LD) focusing on R&D and teaching in technology education and educational technology. The previous studies of the research group concentrated on improving learners’ problem solving and inquiry skills by applying web-based learning environments and educational robotics. Special attention has been given the adaptive support mechanisms to enhance learners’ self-regulation and reflection using learning environments “Hiking across Estonia”, “Young Scientist”, and “Young Researcher”. Recently, the research focus has shifted towards the questions related to conceptual principles of technology education, technological literacy, and designing learning applications improving skills needed in a technological world, also those needed to develop new products by solving design problems.
In Go-Lab the UTE-LD team is involved in WP1 (Pedagogical framework), WP2 (Go-Lab federation of online labs), and WP8 (Validation and Evaluation). UTE will act as National Coordinator of the project’s implementation in Estonia.
UTE has implemented web-based problem solving and inquiry learning environments in about half of Estonian schools. As a result, several learning environments that have been developed (see http://bio.edu.ee/) have already been applied in lessons according to the national curriculum or in all-over Estonian competitions for small teams of three to five learners. The “Young scientist” and “Young researcher” environments allow learners to run scientific projects, where they have to formulate problems, research questions, and hypotheses, plan and run experiments, analyse and communicate results. In these projects virtual or real laboratories are applied. The implementation and evaluation of the learning environments has been related to several master’s and PhD works.