Project Impacts

GRE@T-PIONEeR aims to create innovative educational materials for teachers and students to learn about reactor physics and safety. The consortium will bring together expertise from all over Europe to contribute their nuclear and educational knowledge in order to create new, accessible and interactive resources.

Impacts

By creating and delivering specialised courses on nuclear education, and taking feedback from students and teachers into account, GRE@T-PIONEeR will have the following impacts:

  • Securing the availability of competence, knowledge and skills at the graduate level in reactor physics and nuclear reactor safety.
  • Fully integrate hands-on training exercises in the educational resources, using the research and training infrastructures of the partners
  • Offering short period courses, so that they also fit attendees from the industry, without compromising a deep learning approach to the covered topics
  • Teaching reactor physics and nuclear reactor safety using new pedagogical methods relying on flipped classroom and blended learning in general and using distant learning techniques facilities as much as possible, thus making it possible to offer the courses to any student
  • Creating a set of coherent courses where the teachers bring their respective expertise
  • GRE@T-PIONEeR will investigate the conditions to make the alliance sustainable in the long run

benefits for students

The alliance will strive to put student learning as the core of all the activities within the network. The topics covered in GRE@T-PIONEeR will allow the students to fully comprehend all the methods and calculations used for modelling the behaviour of nuclear reactor cores, from the generation of nuclear cross-sections to the response of a reactor during a transient.

The course modules will contain specifically designed interactive sessions during which the various teachers will closely interact with the students in order to support them in their learning. Most of the preparatory course elements will be delivered online and the students will have the possibility to follow the interactive sessions either on-site or remotely on the web, ensuring that the maximum amount of students that want to take these courses have the possibility to do so.

GRE@T-PIONEeR will also give students the opportunity to give their feedback and contribute to the course design, giving their opinion and recommendations on what worked, what could be improved and what other features they would like to see.

benefits for TEACHERs

Teachers using GRE@T-PIONEeR materials will have access to new methods of teaching, including physical and dematerialised forms of teaching. The aim of the GRE@T-PIONEeR system is to offer complementary and coherent courses that come together to tell a story. Educational materials will be created based on research in education (e.g. Bloom’s revised taxonomy for the cognitive domain, find out more here) to ensure that the course design has a robust scientific basis. Experts in education will also support the consortium in the development of the teaching resources.

The resources will be offered in a variety of formats, including webcasts, quizzes, physical or virtual classrooms and hand-on exercises. Moreover, embedding quizzes in the pre-recorded webcasts allows splitting the lectures into smaller chunks, increasing the students’ attention and thus improving the conditions for learning. As an additional benefit, the online quizzes allow the teachers to continuously monitor students’ comprehension of key concepts.