RemoteLab - A common teaching resource for European schools

REMOTE LAB – A short description of the project This project was about establishing and using complex IT training environments via the internet. The users of these IT training environments were enabled to access and to use IT equipment which quite often can’t be afforded by a single school because of the high costs for acquisition and maintenance. Working together and sharing resources has enabled more schools and their students to benefit from modern IT training environments. A priority was to create and offer training materials for networks, network security, virtualization, operating systems and databases. The aim was to offer free and easily accessible modern training materials to teachers and students with a strong focus on giving students the possibility to apply their knowledge and improve their skills by doing practical exercises. A further objective of the project was to create awareness for possible perspectives for young IT experts on the European job market and to encourage entrepreneurship. Students got to know companies offering jobs in their IT departments or data processing service centres, the also got to know entrepreneurs who run their own IT company. The administration of the IT training environment (e.g. reservation, providing resources, accountancy) and the user administration was realised by using both the open source e-learning management system Ilias and software developed during the project. This learning management system is also used in order to provide learning environments, training units and assessment tests. The software required in order to perform these tasks, the learning environments and the practical training units was developed during the project together with the students who were involved. For all the relevant topics training units on various levels were created. Four schools from different countries – all of them providing vocational training in ICT - participated in the project and worked together. During the project there were transnational meetings with teachers and students at the participating schools where we worked on the different tasks of the project. Furthermore, there were three meetings for teachers only: the first one in order to plan how to proceed and decide about evaluation etc., a mid-term meeting for monitoring the projects progress, elaborating further activities, assessment and evaluation, practical organisation of further meetings with students etc., and the last one for a retrospective, plans for dissemination and measures to ensure the sustainability of the project and its results, and also to decide how to organise further collaboration. The potential longer term benefit is the creation of a valuable working ITC training environment available to further generations of students and teachers and also external users. Students can benefit from the high quality training, and especially the students involved in the project benefit from their enhanced entrepreneurial awareness and intercultural competence when looking for a job on the European job market.