In the first meeting of the Spring 2020 STEM faculty interest group, we had moved to emergency online teaching after the COVID crisis began. After 6 weeks of online teaching, we met on April 28 and discussed the following key questions. Here are some of the thoughts shared by the participants:
What are the goals for a STEM lab in general (online or otherwise)?
We want students to be able to
- formulate hypotheses
- gather data
- draw conclusions
- analyze data
- think like a scientist
What has worked well in your online labs over the past month? What activities accomplish the goals of a lab experience?
- Create an outline of material, exercise to do and an assignment to upload
- Interactive online labs (include how to download)
- Students complete a report page
- Online simulations
- Writing new OER lab activities
- Give a pre lab assignments
- Use dropbox to share resources with colleagues https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yaar9cgnxzfrpmi/AAA58aEw3nldhdJCSny8rWXKa?dl=0
- CUNY Open Lab: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/
What problems or challenges are you experiencing in delivering effective lab experiences?
- Students do not have access to a lab manual (a good reason to shift to online OERs or create your own)
- Students cannot show up to synchronous sessions (for a variety of reasons)
- Students have trouble understanding directions and cannot easily ask questions if asynchronous
- Finding or creating quality resources is time-consuming
Next session:
- Come prepared to share an online lab activity that has worked well in your class
- We’ll discuss creating a repository for sharing resources more broadly