Designing online pre-laboratory activities for chemistry undergraduate laboratories

Dino Spagnoli, Cara Rummey, Nikki Man, Siobhan Wills, Tristan Clemons

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference paperChapterpeer-review

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Abstract

Student preparation is essential for any successful learning. This is especially true within the laboratory, which can be seen as a complex learning environment. Students are very familiar with receiving information from online sources, with an increased amount of students using their mobile devices as their primary source for information. Therefore, providing the pre-laboratory material via this medium is a growing trend in tertiary institutions. In this chapter, we describe the processes in designing and evaluating online pre-laboratory activities. Moreover, we describe a very quick, free, and simple way to make any video interactive. We illustrate the reasons for the approaches taken with responses from student surveys. Students found the interactive pre-laboratory videos more beneficial to their preparation and stimulated their curiosity for the laboratory. The approach we used could be applied to any undergraduate chemistry laboratory program. The use of online pre-laboratory videos
can be particularly useful for students doing different laboratories on a rotation.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTeaching Chemistry in Higher Education: A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Tina Overton
EditorsMichael Seery, Claire McDonnell
Place of PublicationDublin
PublisherCreathach Press
Chapter22
Pages315-322
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)978-0992823313, 0992823315
Publication statusPublished - 5 Jul 2019

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