6. Explore ways to deliever lab experiences

The purpose of the Lab module is to help you plan the lab experiences that need to be integrated into your course. Laboratory classes provide students with hands-on experience with course concepts and with the opportunity to explore critical practices of their discipline. Labs can take a number of forms including science labs, language, child behavior, nursing simulations.  Online labs bring particular challenges and opportunities that differ from those in a standard classroom environment.  

That said, just as you would in any course environment, let your learning objectives and your plans for assessing student learning (formative & summative) guide the design of your lab.

Go to lab experience lesson

 Instruction

Lesson Topics

Visit each one of the following pages to learn more about each lesson outcome

Objectives: By the end of this lesson you will be able to: 

    1. Identify the student learning outcomes & experiences that need to be integrated into your course and any student learning outcomes.  
    2. Identify the online strategies that work best for your lab.  
    3. Outline the plan for your lab.  

Resources

    General: 

    Presentations by ECU Faculty 

    GoPro is my Hero: Teaching microbiology lab skills in the time of COVID – Guyla Evans, College of Allied Health 

    How do you teach advanced plate-reading skills and biochemical techniques to future clinical laboratory scientists when they can’t come into the lab? Enter the GoPro Hero – an easy-to-use, lightweight, portable camera. Video from the GoPro, along with a healthy dose of Canvas pages, still photos, and microscope image capture, can give students a scientist’s-eye view of what’s happening at the bench. 

    Ending the semester with (a) Spark! – Sambuddha Banerjee, Harriot College of Arts & Sciences 

    This session will introduce the audience to Adobe Spark and how this simple tool can be integrated for building course material and be used to teach digital literacy to STEM students. The learning curve for Adobe Curve is not steep and students are able to share their projects on their professional website making them more competitive in the job market.    

    Sparking Joy with Adobe Spark – David Lagomasino, Coastal Studies Institute 

    Join this session to hear how one instructor teaching a 4-credit graduate course in an 8-week block developed Adobe Spark pages to introduce topics each week. This platform allowed for a continuous (scrolling-based) lesson with embedded figures and videos, without the need to download a hefty PowerPoint. Follow-up in-person meetings provided the opportunity to review the lesson and reinforce fundamentals with critical thinking exercises and student-led discussions of related scientific papers. Students welcomed the spark pages as a learning tool that provided more interaction and engagement over traditional lectures using PowerPoint. 

    Engaging students in laboratory courses online – Steve Wolf & Mark Sprague, Harriot College of Arts & Sciences 

    The transition to online learning due to COVID-19 presented the physics department with an opportunity to fill an institutional need: online laboratory courses that fulfill general education requirements.  The key challenge is to create a curriculum that engages students in meaningful science practices in an environment where students do not have access to a key resource: the laboratory learning environment.  As a part of an NSF-funded effort, we have created a curriculum that engages students in meaningful science practice.  In this presentation, we will discuss how we translated the laboratory learning environment to an online context, including the creation of kits that students purchase in lieu of a lab manual to provide students with a hands-on experience. 

    Sparking Social Awareness in STEM Sid Mitra, Harriot College of Arts & Sciences 

    Undergraduate geology majors in a “Math for Geologists” course use Adobe Spark (some for the first time) to create 3-5 minute video presentations about famous black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) mathematicians and geoscientists. 

    ECU Faculty Presentations on Pedagogy and Canvas 

    Open Educational Resources: 

    Repositories of Resources: 

    Tools (More are in the repository section): 

     Try it

    Complete an action plan by listing your Learning Outcomes, Activities, Assessments, and Delivery tools.

     

     References & Acknowledgments

    References

    N Baker and J Verran (2004). The future of microbiology laboratory classes—wet, dry, or in combination? Nature Reviews Microbiology 2, 338-42. 

    L Gomes and S Bogosyan (2009). Current trands in remote laboratories. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics 56, 4744-4756. 

    Z Hossain, X Jin, EW Bumbacher, AM Chung, S Koo, JD Shapiro, CY Truong, S Choi, ND Orloff, P Blikstein, and IH Riedel-Kruse (2015). Interactive cloud experimentation for biology: An online education case study. CHI 2015 https://web.stanford.edu/group/riedel-kruse/publications/Hossain_2015_Chi_Physarum_Cloud.pdf. 

    D Kennepohl, J. Baran, M. Connors, K. Quigley, and R Currie (2005). Remote access to instrumental analysis for distance education in science. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 6, http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/rt/printerFriendly/260/404. 

    Martinez-Jimenez, P., Pontes-Pedraja, A., Polo, J. and Climent-Bellido, M. S. Learning chemistry with virtual laboratories. J. Chem. Educ. 80, 346–352 (2003). 

    RE Mayer and R Moreno (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist 38, 43-52. 

    K Millis, C Forsyth, H Butler, P Wallace, A Graesser, and D Halpern (2011). Operation ARIES!: A Serious Game for Teaching Scientific Inquiry. In Serious Games and Edutainment Applications, eds M Ma, A Oikonomou, and LC Jain. Springerpp. 169-195. 

    Sommers, B. A. & Sommers, R. A virtual lab in research methods. Teach. Psychol. 30, 171–173 (2003). 

    Acknowledgments

    Teach Remotely:  Dartmouth.  This site was originally adapted from Indiana University’s “Keep Teaching” resource by Dartmouth ITC’s Learning Design and Technology team in partnership with the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. If you have comments, questions, or feedback, please email learning.design.tech@dartmouth.edu. This works is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 license — meaning anyone copy and redistribute the material as long as you give appropriate credit and do not use the material for commercial purposes. (by Trustees of Indiana University and Trustees of Dartmouth College). Other contributors are cited on each resource. Please give credit where credit is due. 

    University of Vanderbilt – Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Photo Credit: Shadab via Compfight cc 

    Module 7 – Development