Uma infraestrutura tecnológica de suporte aos docentes na adoção de laboratórios virtuais baseada em experiências de uso

Abstract

Virtual laboratories (VLs) are educational software that allow the simulation of activities of real laboratories. Its use motivates students and reduces the costs and dangers of these activities, such as dealing with procedures that need to be constantly monitored for the safety of the student or the laboratory equipment itself. In today's context, where students become increasingly digital technology users and educational institutions are struggling financially to acquire technologies to support all the activities that need to be developed, teachers have VLs as an alternative to real labs. However, these teachers are faced with a problem when they decide to use them: the choice of software. Among the mechanisms that have the potential to help teachers adopt these tools are usage information, often lost after an activity with a virtual lab. This work presents a technological infrastructure to support the selection of VLs based on the information provided by the teachers about the experiences of using these laboratories. Initially, an instrument was developed to register teachers' experiences in the use of VLs from initial searches in the literature. The instrument underwent improvements after a pilot study, a systematic review of the literature on the subject and evaluation of specialists. Then the tool called VLEx was developed to organize the records, allowing the visualization of individual and/or grouped information by virtual laboratory about an experiment. Finally, the VLEx underwent an acceptance evaluation, being verified its usefulness, ease and the intention of use by teachers, that consist of the public target in the tool. As a result, we have the instrument for registering teachers' experiences in the use of VLs, the tool that organizes this information and the records of use experience of VLs organized, composing a technological infrastructure capable of making information about a use experience, usually discarded, useful for teaching assistants in the selection of virtual laboratories.