Abstract:

Research activities on pedagogical models emphasize the importance of both knowledge transfer and sharing and prompt, as well, the development of relevant tools. The net outcome of these activities is to encourage teachers to plan the educational paths of their courses by designing, implementing and integrating Learning Objects (LOs), in order to promote the dissemination and sharing of knowledge / experience built with the use of innovative educational tools. This is, also, the goal of the joint efforts of the “Educational Innovation Office & E-learning Lab” (LABEL) team of the University of Perugia (www.unipg.it/didattica/e-learning/laboratorio-e-learning) and of the Master-UP srl SME (www.master-up.it) when deploying Open Molecular Science Cloud (OMSC) services to support the local and the European Chemistry Thematic Network (ECTN) (ectn.eu) educational activities.

These efforts are articulated at various levels:
-basic level “CARRY OUT A SHARED DEVELOPMENT OF LOs;
-middle level “IMPLEMENT PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATIONS FOR DEVELOPED LOs”;
-upper level “ACHIEVE EDUCATIONAL VALIDATION”.

As an application, the paper deals with the work performed for the course “Molecular Dynamics and Chemical Reactivity” (MDCR) of the Master Erasmus Mundus Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling (TCCM) (tccm.qui.uam.es) by analysing some LOs developed for its first section “From the phenomenology of chemical reactions to the classical mechanics modelling of two body collisions” and the related book [1].

The strategy of the scope of the objective is adopted in order to maximize the proper evolution of the content and the enhancement of the virtuosity of LOs sharing. This allows, in fact, a continuous updating of the contents by the whole community of teachers belonging to the same scientific area (this is often named “holistic granularity” [2]).

The LOs considered here are going also to be taken as candidate case studies within MOSEX (the OMSC component of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Pillar project started on July 1 this year (ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-cloud#). Related services provided to the Molecular Science Community will be evaluated using the Quality of Service (QoS) [3] tools developed for distributed and cloud computing and used by the members of the CMS2 consortium (www.cms-2.org) for the COMPCHEM Virtual Organizations.

This activity has significantly impacted in particular the educational sector in which ECTN is a European leader by running EChemTest® e-test activities for Molecular Sciences.

In this context, LABEL has developed an innovative LO model focused on the "granularity"[4] criterion in micro-learning approach allowing a more direct and accurate evaluation of the quality of developed LOs.

References:
[1] A. Laganà, G.A. Parker, Chemical Reactions Basic Theory and Computing, Springer International Publishing 2018; ISBN 978-3-319-62355-9
[2] Johannes Strobel, Gretchen Lowerison, Roger Côté, Philip C. Abrami and Edward C. Bethel - “Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications, and Technologies“ - 2009 - DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-861-1.ch017
[3] C Manuali, A Laganà, Trial User, Resources and Services Quality Evaluation for Grid Communities Sustainability, Computational Science and Its Applications--ICCSA 9156, 324-338 (2015)
[4] A. Moriconi, S. Pasqua, A. Laganà, E-learning granularity for a chemical reactivity learning objects, 2019; ISSN: 2279-8773

Keywords:

e-learning, Granularity, Learning Objects, Innovative educational tools, educational activities, Chemistry, Open Molecular Sciences Cloud.