Enhancing STEM education
Dublin City University’s Dr Gabriel-Miro Muntean introduces NEWTON, an innovative new Horizon 2020 project aimed at improving learning experiences and outcomes using technology-enhanced methodologies and tools
The European Parliament forecasts some seven million job openings in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) sector by 2025, but high drop-out rates and a continuing inability to attract new students to the subjects means Europe is at dire risk of running out of talent to fill them. Hoping to change this is the Horizon 2020-funded project NEWTON, a three-year initiative aimed at reimagining the learning experience and improving outcomes with the aid of novel, innovative technology-enhanced learning (TEL) methodologies and tools.
Spearheaded by Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland, the €5.6m project is an ambitious collaboration between eight industry partners and six academic partners across seven European countries, and hopes to keep its users engaged, inspired and on track via an adaptive and personalised STEM learning experience which incorporates multisensorial media, augmented reality and gamification.
Here, co-ordinator Dr Gabriel-Miro Muntean, a senior lecturer at DCU’s School of Electronic Engineering and co-director of the Performance Engineering Laboratory, discusses the project’s aims, shares his thoughts on STEM’s high attrition rates and offers his view on the limitations of traditional classroom-based learning.
Can you begin by providing an overview of the NEWTON project?
NEWTON is a large-scale, pan-European project aimed at developing, integrating and disseminating TEL methods and tools in order to create a novel way of delivering STEM which not only enhances the learner’s experience but also improves learning outcomes. It is aimed at both the students themselves but also the educators – the teachers, lecturers and so on who have to engage with the class and deliver the content.
We therefore have a number of targets: first of all, we intend to introduce novel aspects into the learning process such as multimodal content delivery and multisensorial media distribution – i.e. haptics and smells, not just audiovisual stimuli – as well as state-of-the-art technology, e.g. augmented reality and gamification in real life and virtual labs.
Another important goal will be adaptivity. People access content using different devices, on different networks and in different places, and obviously their experience with it is influenced by their operational environment. The content therefore has to take that into account.
Last but not least, we would like to personalise and adapt the content to the user profile. We have a variety of users – students and teachers, vocational schools and secondary or third level education institutes – as well as a particular focus on providing support for people with physical disabilities.
Using a European-wide real life pilot, we’ll then validate the effectiveness of the teaching scenarios and the technology according to the user satisfaction and improvements made in the learning experience and outcomes.
What would you say is missing from the conventional learning process today?
At the moment the learning process is still relatively static: a teacher stands at the front of the classroom and delivers the content to the students. New teaching methods are, however, being added to this; for instance, a significant effort is being put into delivering content to remote users across borders and across different institutions, which is positioning the user in the driving seat of the learning process. That’s a real step forward: remote access to expensive technologies increases efficiency, choice and the user’s options. The NEWTON project caters to that transformation and will hopefully provide the tools to facilitate it and to demonstrate its benefits for both learners and educators.
And hopefully in doing so that will help to reverse STEM’s high attrition rate.
Yes – STEM subjects are perceived by students to be the most challenging subjects; they require hard work, abstract thinking and difficult concepts, and as such a lot of people are put off from pursuing them. Not only that – a lot of students who take STEM subjects later drop out. This is the case in most developed countries.
We are hopeful that by introducing innovative technologies to the learning process, we can make learning STEM more appealing, more interesting and, ultimately, easier. That will not only reduce the attrition rate but also attract new students.
Previous definitions of TEL have disagreed as to the exact meaning of ‘enhanced’. What is your understanding?
Some people think of enhanced only in the sense of using the latest technologies. NEWTON takes this view as well, but it’s not the only factor that is important. We also need to look at pedagogical methods, at extracting the user profiles, at encouraging collaboration and interaction with the system, and at making the content more interesting and more useful for the development of the learner.
How do you foresee the TEL mechanisms and methodologies working in the traditional classroom environment? Will this require extensive training for the staff and students?
To begin with, the project will be based on the traditional classroom environment, as this is the way most institutions currently operate. The network compatibility of the system, in that sense, is as such important for us and needs to be retained.
However, we don’t want to limit the development of the project to the boundaries of the classroom, so as we progress into phase two of the project, we’ll try as much as we can to enable remote access to the resources and to provide support regardless of the user’s location. Our target is a European-scale learning environment in which students and educators can access the content regardless of where they are, regardless of their devices and regardless of their network connectivity, and where they can interact with the system and improve both their learning outcome and their learning experience.
This will naturally require a training period – but that’s true of introducing any technology. We don’t believe the learning curve will be particularly steep, and the fact that it will involve the latest technologies and novel methods will make it an attractive new learning paradigm of real benefit, so hopefully educators will be willing to put the effort in to train themselves.
How will you measure the success of the project?
There are a number of different biometrics by which we will judge the success of the project, some of them technology-related (e.g. loss rate of the transmission, etc.) and some perceptual-related. These latter aspects include things like quality of perception and of experience, and they will be assessed based on user feedback.
We also intend to compare and contrast the learning outcomes of different groups of users, some of them located in different countries, some of them using different methods, some of them using legacy systems and some of them using the proposed NEWTON system – that way we can see what works and what doesn’t. To do that, we’ll look at online tests as well as the results of exams the students will actually sit as part of their continuous assessment or examinations in real modules. For instance, here at DCU we intend to deploy part of the outcomes of the project within a master’s module, and we can easily compare those to the results of the previous year to see where the benefits of the new technology lie.
In disseminating these results, we hope to have an important influence on the development of TEL in the future.
Dr Gabriel-Miro Muntean
Dublin City University
NEWTON
This article first appeared in issue 12 of Horizon 2020 Projects: Portal, available here.
