The Study Of Web-Based Inquiry Teaching

With the appearance of network, especially the rapid development and popularization of the Internet, the web-based learning became a theme for which people cared more and more. Besides, relative to the conventional pedagogy, the inquiry-based teaching revealed its increasingly importance. The network provide us vast resources, powerful processing tools and convenient communication environment, which make the web-based inquiry teaching break through the limit of class-based inquiry teaching. Under the open educational environment, the web-based inquiry is necessary to us at present.What is the web-based inquiry teaching? How can we put the inquiry teaching into practice based on the web resources? How to design web-based inquiry activities according to the standards? These questions all need to be explained. This paper discusses the theories of the web-based inquiry teaching, such as the essentials, the characteristics, the standards and the design of inquiry activity, to improve our understanding of it.Then, the paper considers the advantages of carrying on the web-based inquiry teaching using Virtual Observatory (VO), and the relative technology. In view of the features of astronomy and the conflict between the traditional astronomy pedagogy and the student's cognitive development, we think the web-based inquiry teaching is a good choice in today's astronomy education. On the other hand, the concept of VO is put forward in the near years. The principal goal of VO is to integrate and utilize the worldwide major astronomical research resources transparently. Though a great deal of data and images have already existed on the web, VO facilitates the...