eContent and Life Sciences

Evaluation of the e-learning pilot project “eContent and Life Sciences”

As part of the school project “eContent and Life Sciences,” ten school teams from all over Austria were involved in an exchange program with scientists. This exchange started in the fall of 2005, when scientists acted as “mentors” for individual school teams. The scientific researchers visited the respective schools while the school teams in turn explored the scientists’ working environments. Additional exchange was provided through discussion forums on the online learning platform Moodle. The pupils presented their chosen bioscience topic through e-learning sequences on a website.

Commissioned by Dialog Gentechnik, the goal of our evaluation was to examine the suitability of the concept of “mentoring” for building a network between scientists and schools, and to identify successful aspects of the project as well as needs for improvement.

Recommendations were derived using 20 qualitative telephone interviews and a final quantitative survey of all participating students, teachers, and researchers.

The following areas were examined: project conceptualization (clarity of objectives, time allocation, technical issues, process within the school, amount of work, project management), design of the mentoring program (exchange, activities, cooperation, communication), learning effects for project participants (skill acquisition, experiences, expectations) and the satisfaction of all participants (positive and negative aspects).