OSU Course Helps Teachers with Online Lab Science Classes
Oregon State
University (OSU) is collaborating with a private partenr on a graduate-level course
designed to help the students teach their own online
laboratory science classes.
In the
class, now offered online twice a year, students — most of whom teach
online
lab science classes themselves — work with a number of content
delivery modes
that include but are not limited to virtual labs, lab packs, kitchen
science,
data mining and field work, evaluating for themselves how the
different modes
work for the courses they teach.
eScience
Labs, a company that provides customizable lab kits for online lab
science
courses at the university level, supplies lab kits, a set of hands-on
experiments and curricular materials for the OSU courses
titled "Instruments
and Online Interactions in the Sciences." The lab kits can be
customized so
that the students in the course can use them in the courses they teach
themselves.
Michael
Lerner, a chemistry professor who teaches the course, acknowledges
that many
institutions and instructors are reluctant to even consider trying to
teach
online lab science classes because of the perceived challenges of
conducting
live experiments in remote locations.
However,
Lerner said, "Distance
methods can attain learning outcomes at least comparable to those for a
conventional classroom or lab experience in the development of
foundational lab
concepts."
The course offered by OSU's
Ecampus is available as a 10-week class during the fall semester and as a
condensed
4-week course during the summer session.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.