Opening the doors of the laboratory
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The document discusses distance education in science at Athabasca University, emphasizing the implementation of home lab kits and remote labs to enhance online learning. It highlights the evolution of lab kits, the integration of technology, and the importance of hands-on experience in science education. Overall, it argues that modern online labs can be effective, cost-efficient, and provide students with practical learning outcomes comparable to traditional settings.
Opening the doors of the laboratory
- 1. Opening the Doors of the Laboratory: Distance Education Science Martin Connors Athabasca University Thanks: Farook Al- Shamali Rafael Hakobyan Elaine Goth- Birkigt Frankenstein (1931) copyright expired
- 2. Online Science Education Athabasca University is an Alberta-based distance education university. Its online science courses are dominated by freshman offerings and serve at-home students of other universities. Moodle is the main web vehicle and course materials are a mixture of online and print. Freshman university science courses usually have laboratory exercises!
- 3. The monster in the room: How can an online course have labs? How about virtual reality? No, Science is real reality! Less “tongue in cheek”, accepting institutions do not want something so different. Frankenstein (1931) copyright expired A real experiment has to happen With modern technology this can be: At home online
- 4. What is an experiment? Artist: Stuart McMillen, http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/bustle-cagerow-making-rat-park/ Tests a hypothesis Gets data I can ace the labs and get into med school boring Cool, rats are so smart!
- 5. Why make students do experiments? • Connect the curriculum to the real world • Learn about uncertainty and how to test • Practical experience with equipment • Testing (weed out klutzes from surgery) • Everybody else does it In many cases, freshman labs are straight out of the 17th, 18th, or 19th century! US Library of Congress (1884) Public Domain
- 6. The Solution "Lab glassware" by Tweenk - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lab_glassware.jpg#/media/File:Lab_glassware.jpg
- 7. Distance Education Motivation Students enroll in distance education because they do not want to come to campus So why bring them to the lab when you can bring the lab to them? “Home lab” Canada Post – unaltered in accordance with usage rules
- 8. If you build it they won’t come… First Physics Home Lab Kit (1997) brought about a large enrollment increase! Update: now about 500 physics students per year
- 9. Blast from the Past We could send Calculator-Based Labs from Texas Instruments in a small package. The calculator could make data graphs on its screen. This was 1997! When PCs became universal, could transfer over data.
- 10. Modern Lab Kits Calculators are now a thing of the past (for labs at least). Modern sensors plug into the computer with USB link. “Graphical Analysis” software shows data as it is collected and allows fits to data. (Electricity and Magnetism Lab kit shown) Link Electric Current Sensor
- 11. Business end of success: Lab kits are refurbushed in our lab, loaned by library, sent out by post or courier These are CHEM kits: now used in PHYS, BIOL, GEOL, CHEM Photo: 2015 Sue and Derrick Rowlandson Memorial Award for Service Excellence winner Rafael Hakobyan Over 1000 kits per year loaned to students
- 12. Old style physics kits New style physics kit with packing list Biology kit
- 13. Movie • Vid-exp3.mp4 (by Farook Al-Shamali) • Lab instructions by home-made video, placed on course website
- 14. Now for something completely different: Remote Labs Philosophy: a lab should still take place, but remotely controlled online by the student In a real lab, errors take place, and the student must use judgement in taking data and analyzing it Visual feedback is also essential for a real experience Further, by doing the lab, the student gets a feeling of ownership of the data
- 15. Historic Rube Goldberg Attempt at Online Labs (2002) What students saw: web page with one variable (height) and one output (time to drop) Also a webcam picture to show that they were doing a real experiment
- 16. Anybody been to the Computer Museum? There used to be a thing called a dot matrix printer! If you tip one on its side and tell it to print, it can pick up a metal ball with a solenoid, then time the fall, all under control of a Microchip PIC, hooked to the Internet with a “SitePlayer”. (Webcam not shown).
- 17. But, pretty good results! If you drop something from higher up, how long it takes to fall is longer. This device could measure that with microsecond precision. A classic Physics undergraduate lab, done online!
- 18. Return of telepresence with modern technology United Artists (1958) copyright expired Demonstrating 2-d motion of a ball using a computer-controlled online strobe light and camera Next step: computerized ball launcher
- 19. Science experiments in the World of Things $35 now gets you a linux system (Raspberry Pi) to go online, develop code, run headless to run the experiment An inexpensive camera is controlled by “gphoto2”. The expensive part is the $1000 programmable flash generator
- 20. What we have learned? • Distance education labs can be incredibly cost effective: kits cost little to mail and refurbish compared to the capital cost of on-campus laboratory buildings • Learning outcomes are good and accepted for transfer credit • Sending stuff out in the “mail” seems old fashioned but is a viable part of online business models (like Amazon/Fedex) • High tech is a real part of the sensors in the kits but not all labs need high tech (“Galileo with a hockey puck”) • Telepresence can make “real” labs available online • We will look at the use of hand-held devices (for example video analysis of cellphone video)