See How a Virtual Lab Can Provide Flexibility And Continuity During Shortened Weeks That Contain Holidays…
The fall semester starts off with a holiday and depending on your school you also may have off for a long weekend for Fall Break, Martin Luther King Day, a long weekend for Easter, etc. There may also be the emergency school closings for hurricane warnings in the south and extreme cold and snow in the north, among other things. When a lab week is disrupted with a holiday, yes, you’ve been able to anticipate it and work it into your lab schedule, but it still can be challenging making up that lab. And if lab is cancelled for an emergency shutdown, it can become a downright hassle re-scheduling that lost time. For many schools, lab time is at a premium, and already scheduled to the max, so re-scheduling may cause a serious disruption to already scheduled time and require you to work longer hours to make up the lab.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
For those weeks with holidays, you can plan a virtual lab so that everyone gets their lab time that week. When we say virtual lab, we are talking about a self-contained lab featuring pre-lab background, comprehension questions, a data-driven lab that can be performed remotely, and post-lab. Data can be provided to the students, and that data can vary student to student, so their work relates to their data and not anyone else’s. If you have a few virtual labs up your lab coat sleeve, and hold them for those periods where your school may be likely to close for weather-related or other reasons, you can assign those virtual hold outs during a week with a lab shut down.
Let’s take a look at what you, a normally face-to-face lab lecturer, can accomplish remotely with LabRight Chemistry during a holiday/emergency shut-down week.
Chemistry With LabRight
You can easily transition certain wet labs to virtual labs like significant figures, Beer’s Law, and chromatography by generating unique data for each student that students work with, derive results on, and then submit for auto grading. For molecular structures, students choose what the structures look like, and their choices are auto graded. A lab on naming conventions is an ideal candidate for being performed online. Measurement labs can be built around items easily found remotely so students work with data they generate and are asked questions specific to their results.
Winning Features of Holiday Digital Labs…
- All the background information is provided in the pre-lab.
- Instructional videos can be incorporated into the lab.
- If students are gathering data on their own for lab, that data can be compiled to create large data sets for everyone to analyze.
- An integrated graphing tool bypasses the need for using Excel or Google Sheets for students gathering data on their own for labs like kinetics or measuring temperature curves.
- Students use tables for recording and automatic grading.
- Lab reports can be written into the platform with the option of uploading outside documents.
The labs you use can come from our library, could be yours that we translate and expand to the LabRight Chemistry platform, and can be supplemented with open-source material from the likes of ChemCollective, phET and Merlot.
Anatomy & Physiology with LabRight
Thanks to our use of BioDigital images, your A&P labs can be completed on the LabRight A&P platform without students missing out on quality time with your lab models. Our BioDigital 2D & 3D images are fully rotatable and can be zoomed into and out of, colored, hidden, labeled, and whiteboarded so that students draw, label and upload their work for grading. These incredibly detailed, 360 degree-rotatable images are the next best thing to students holding a model and examining it from all sides in lab.
You can use your own labs or a combination of open resource material to create effective and memorable online labs. Another option is to use the labs Dr. Corey Johnson from UNC Chapel Hill created for his hybrid labs and tweak certain ones to make them all virtual.
In physiology, students can use their own or variable data for online labs and are questioned on their unique data. Dr. Daniel McNabney from the University of Georgia has created an all-digital lab on blood pressure where students collect, post, analyze and interpret their data and then analyze all of the data collected from the other students in the lab, that we can tweak for your needs. If it doesn’t work for students to collect their own data at home, the data can be provided.
More Winning Features of Holiday Digital Labs…
- You can get the exact images you want your students to learn from by selecting from our extensive BioDigital image bank.
- Three different types of flashcards are at your disposal to be worked into some portion of the lab.
- A wide-range of assessment types can be programmed to your spelling tolerances and automatically graded.
Takeaways
So rather than get behind when holidays or school closings threaten your carefully choreographed lab routine, embrace technology where it works to turn some of your wet labs into effective, interactive virtual ones.
LabRight allows us to take in-person labs and create virtual labs out of them, especially data-driven ones. The material on the platform can be yours, ours, or open source, to create a tailored multimedia interactive experience that works as virtual labs when the circumstances require it. The LabRight platform can be embedded in your LMS, allowing students’ grades to immediately link to your gradebook.
Our LabRight Platform Is a Great Solution For Labs
LabRight, an all-in-one seamless digital platform, is ideal because it is customizable and offers simple, lab-specific digital tools. We set it all up for you and provide training. LabRight turns the challenges you’re facing into new teaching and learning opportunities. LabRight is so flexible it can be used for face-to-face, virtual or hybrid labs, and is ideal for pre-, in- or post-lab work.
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Van-Griner Learning
Van-Griner Learning is a full-service, affordable, publisher of digital and print solutions. We unlock the power of publishing by designing affordable digital and print solutions to meet your specific needs. We provide Labs, Textbooks, Worktext, Homework, OER, Readers, Courseware and more!
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