null DojoIBL supports collaborative inquiry based learning

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Digital Learning
DojoIBL supports collaborative inquiry based learning
Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) establishes questions as a starting point for learning. Students undertake a combination of formal and informal activities and a continuous exploration based on social interactions to generate the answer to that question and in such a way they generate new knowledge. But how do you follow and support that process? On the one hand students need freedom to investigate on the other hand there is no structured learning task so they need closer process support and guidance. DojoIBL is a web based platform that supports collaborative learning processes. Angel Suarez, researcher at the Welten Institute, presented DojoIBL at the ICWL 2017 conference in South Africa and received the best paper award for it.

Continuous improvement

DojoIBL imitates real-world research processes and organizes inquiry activities into several phases. DojoIBL blends formal (desk-top based) learning and informal (mobile) learning. DojoIBL considers lessons learned from an earlier EU-project in which the Welten Institute participated: the weSPOT project. It offers a cloud-based highly scalable infrastructure that has a strong focus on (mobile) data collection. Within the course of 1 year, a design based research methodology was implemented in 10 national and international inquiry projects. Within this period, students were inter-viewed at regular times. Time and task management issues turned out to be critical functionalities and were thus implemented in several iterations. In that way DojoIBL is continuously being refined and improved.

Dojo Analytics at mLearn 2017

One of the most recent additions to DojoIBL is DojoAnalytics. DojoIBL expands the learning process beyond the classroom walls and brings it to an online setting. Such transition requires teachers and learners to have more means to track and to follow up their progress. Learning Analytics dashboards provide such functionality in form of meaningful visualizations. Therefore DojoAnalytics was developed, a new module of DojoIBL that enables connections with third party Learning Analytics dashboards. Suarez presented DojoAnalytics at the end of October at the mLearn conference, the 16th world conference on mobile and contextual learning.

Check out the presentation Angel Suarez gave at the ICWL conference 2017 in Cape Town South Africa.

Or read the award-winning paper DojoIBL: Online Inquiry-Based Learning by Angel Suarez (et al).