The result of the strategic partnership will be provided by three intellectual outputs, which will be practically applied in an elective pilot module for M.Sc. students “Experiments in a virtual environment” as well as two blended mobility PhD courses:
All learning/training activities supports individuals in acquiring and developing basic skills and key competences. The planned intellectual outputs will contribute to it, whereas especially the intellectual output 3 “Remote-access Experiments in Structural Engineering” creates an added value to innovative practices in a digital era.
Virtual Reality experiments simulated selected physical experiments that were not actually carried out during studies due to dangers or the effort involved, in a 3D, realistic, and content-correct representation. This concept was demonstrated in the PARFORCE settings by real, physical experiments, which were presented and located in a virtual environment with certain interaction possibilities. The main innovative objective was the availability of elaborate experiments that were not standard but were carried out at specialized institutes, to a potentially huge community of students. In the present project, these were boundary layer wind tunnel experiments at the Ruhr University Bochum, non-destructive and destructive experiments on shake tables at the Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology (IZIIS), and fire tests at the University of Aveiro. This enabled the expansion of the educational opportunities for a broad group of students at the partner universities. The master students of civil engineering courses at the universities of Weimar and Osijek acted as pilot users in the project. One aim was to open up the different model ideas in experiments in civil engineering and to communicate them to the students. This was done in an internationalized and digitized way.
The Didactic Meeting at Bochum (see Transnational Project Meeting) was intended to present a comprehensive overview of the possibilities and offers of eLearning in the PARFORCE project. Digital tools, as well as possible application scenarios, were discussed, and different support options were shown. The aim was to use this information to motivate the planned further steps for the implementation of digital synchronous and asynchronous teaching offers. The event looked at how online cooperation could be well planned and structured. In this context, participants learned about the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of different tools for online cooperation and possible application scenarios. Additionally, topics were addressed that frequently caused problems in practice, e.g., active participation or feedback.
The aim of the introduction was to familiarize participants, namely students and teaching and non-teaching staff, with the use of the basic and advanced possibilities of Moodle. Based on an exercise course, the course setup, the provision and administration of documents, the sensible use of communication and collaboration tools, and the development of automatically evaluable tasks were trained (GrAFOS). The course focused on the use of communication and collaboration tools in Moodle. These included forums, wikis, blogs, diaries (journals), videoconferencing, and glossaries. In addition, the joint work in a chat room and the maintenance of a database were discussed. By means of a demo course, the participants got a vivid insight into the handling of the different collaborative possibilities. The calendar of events and the corresponding time schedule were built and tracked within the Moodle environment. In the course of the event, a demo course provided advanced knowledge of the assessment tools integrated in Moodle, such as short quizzes, tests, and tasks, but also graded forum contributions. The short quizzes or tests were taught to be designed as participant self-evaluation or assessment tools. Special emphasis was placed on the creation of automatically evaluable tests and the different types of tasks and questions available. Furthermore, the handling and the various ways of using the Grading Centre were explained.
To support the international student groups, Researcher Learning in the PARFORCE project was an innovative methodological-didactical approach in which students in internationally composed student groups or teams participated in the joint development of multi-scale models in virtual teaching-learning formats, which were implemented in experiments in virtual environments. The special and diverse demands which this type of learning placed on students could not be met by all students equally due to the focal points of their previous heterogeneous educational biographies. Consequently, the focus shifted to personnel support capacities in particular, which enabled intensive and individual support in the sense of mentoring of intercultural student groups. For this reason, e-tutors were appointed to support and ensure the intended acquisition of competence by the students and to accompany them.
International digital learning, its purpose, and pedagogical framework built upon the creation and development of a contemporary environment, offered learning and research experiences to learners in their own classrooms. The educational value of international digital exchange, which took advantage of ICT resources, was gained by enlarging a classroom with connections and access to a broader research community. By recognizing technology not as a replacement for educators but as a possibility to offer exposure to an international audience and peers, a wide range of skills were developed in learners as well as educators. These skills, such as writing, speech, the use of digital media, presentations, and communication with learners and educators from different countries, were critical in building a proper educational journey for young people of that time. These skills could be successfully transferred later in their academic or industrial careers. As the massive change to digital learning due to the current pandemic showed, digital learning provided its own set of problems, such as finding a balance between synchronous and asynchronous teaching or the higher concentration problems during synchronous teaching in comparison to classroom teaching.
Furthermore, digital learning combined with international exchange promised a low-cost, high-reach approach to expanding education opportunities, particularly in areas where the current knowledge was specialized on a national or even European level. Currently established criteria and strategies for digital learning and evaluation of digital learning were rather generic and did not take into account the specific requirements of Civil Engineering or even Engineering in general. The aim of IO2 was to understand the pedagogic value of international digital exchange by considering the lessons from comparable HEIs' existing digital curricula, goals, and program designs, as well as by observing benefits among learners, educators, and HEI's culture. This also included covering advanced variables that made the curricula effective in order to answer what would make an internationally competent learner and educator. Therefore, the strategy of conducting benchmark tests was to observe, reflect, and link them to existing curricula and approaches, and understand how these affected learners and their learning within a challenging international environment.
A first step was executed by means of thoughtful inquiry to identify characteristics for a successful initiative in digital learning environments by recognizing current and future learners' and educators' expectations. The topics that emerged from Intellectual Output 1 provided crucial guidelines about ensuring adequate digital media, professional development, and broad support from educators to the administration, as well as attention to clear curricular goals and selecting a model that aligned with the requirements of each HEI. In addition, it wrapped up and evaluated the recent experiences (due to the Covid-19 restrictions) from lecturers who had to transform ad hoc standard lectures into digital/virtual formats and students who had to change their study routines. Furthermore, students' feedback was collected for evaluation of the effectiveness of the ad hoc transformation.
The following issues were addressed:
The constant technological development in the last decade has enabled people around the world to communicate more easily than ever before. Even though it was possible, experiments in the field of structural engineering were rarely performed remotely. The practice always involved the physical presence of most participants in the project. However, due to the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, online meetings and remote access experienced a tremendous increase in use in every aspect of modern life. As a result, after 55 years of continuous operation at the Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology in Skopje - IZIIS, the first remote access experimental testing was conducted. These activities were carried out in the framework of mutual collaboration and demand from the Cracow University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering (CUT FCE).
In addition, research has shown that for the human brain, pictorial information is easier to process than textual information, and virtual reality scenarios offer the possibility of contributing to the more efficient formation of a mental model due to their visual nature. Virtual and augmented reality also offer advantages as a means of complementing university engineering education. The high level of immersion allows the learning process to take place on real objects, under realistic proportions and conditions. The perceived reference to reality enhances the learning experience and facilitates the integration of visual information into the mental model through cognitive image processing.
The strategic partnership aims to develop a joint platform for digital/virtual laboratory experiments to support European civil engineering higher education. The main objective of the project was to make various laboratory experiments available that are not part of the standard education at each university but are conducted at specialized institutes. The strategic partnership builds upon recent results in digital research and teaching, such as projects DigiLab4U, AuCity 2, and 3reCapSL. The project partners bring together these results, apply them to partner-specific experiments, and then transfer the experimental results into a digital environment that is made accessible to the general public. The 3D RealityCapture ScanLab (3reCapSL) is particularly useful in closing the existing knowledge gaps in real-time capable ultra-high-resolution spatial recording of dynamic scenes. The high-resolution 3D models are ideal for creating digital worlds and supporting related creative innovations.
The developed datasets will expand educational opportunities for a broad group of structural engineering students at partner universities and abroad (national, European, and international levels with high dissemination potential). Virtual reality experiments simulate selected physical experiments that are not actually carried out during studies due to dangers or the effort involved, providing a three-dimensional, realistic, and accurate representation. This concept is demonstrated in the PARFORCE settings, which present real, physical experiments in a virtual environment with interactive capabilities.
The developed framework/concept will offer the opportunity for other national, European, and international institutions to create and share additional datasets in cooperation with the strategic partnership's partners or independently on the freely accessible platform.
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