A Community of Practice Around Online Labs in Iraq: Towards Effective Support for Academics and Higher Educational Systems in the MENA Region

The growing interest of society in science and engineering disciplines has lead to a quality improvement in curricula; a more careful definition of the educational outcomes; and; an increased concern with the continuous improvement of student learning and the quality of teacher training programmes. Hands-on experiments with innovative instructional technologies (e.g. online labs) built confidence and skills of academics and students by helping them to better understand, especially in those disciplines. A community of practice is a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise or an area of interest in a topic. It focuses on sharing best practices and creating new knowledge to advance a domain of professional practice. In addition, it shares the appropriate activities and instructional technologies that support the higher educational systems. This study aims to examine how teachers and students are interested in using online labs to support hands-on labs for completing their educational tasks and illustrates the potential benefit of a community of practice around online labs. Consequently, in order to facilitate the formation of a new community of practice around instructional technologies in the Middle East and North Africa, several presentations about online labs have been made in different universities in Iraq