Designing online pre-laboratory activities for chemistry undergraduate laboratories

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.