UFOnline professors and instructional designers work to bridge the gap in UFOnline’s 4-year, fully-online degree programs by designing three innovative approaches to completely remote lab experiences that meet cognitive and psychomotor objectives in an effort to foster inquiry-based exploration of science concepts at the same rigor as their face-to-face counterparts.
The University of Florida Online offers 4-year, fully-online bachelor degrees that include general education coursework, coursework that traditionally requires a laboratory experience. This workshop is designed to engage participants in the comparative analysis of three different approaches to remote labs in three courses offered at the University of Florida Online: Physics I, Anatomy and Physiology, and Evolutionary Developmental Biology.
As any science educator can tell you, there are characteristics of face-to-face lab experiences that are difficult to reproduce remotely, especially without instructor guidance. There is little research examining how to best integrate remote experiences that adhere to the same rigor as their face-to-face counterparts. These labs were designed with specific attention to both cognitive and psychomotor learning objectives in order to attempt identify and address exactly which skills could or could not be addressed remotely.
Using design thinking targeted at specific learning objectives and lab skills, each of the remote lab experiences employed a different approach to promoting the inquiry-based exploration of scientific processes. The Physics labs were authored specifically for the IOLab Wireless Lab System. The Anatomy and Physiology labs were authored to use professor-constructed dissection lab kits. Lastly, Evolutionary Development Biology integrated three online virtual simulations created by Labster, but authored specifically to course objectives by university faculty.
During this session, participants will have the opportunity to experience each of the lab approaches and experiment with the devices and simulations. It’s our hope that participants will join our virtual community in order to provide both feedback and collect information on how their programs might incorporate these tools or strategies.
Presenting these lab approaches as they are still evolving is an attempt to connect with other educators and designers to best address the limitations presented by face-to-face class-size, lab space, and demand in order to reinvent the “cookbook” style many face-to-face labs are forced employ. As the demand and learning potential of remote labs grows, we think the tools used by these courses will be refined and used in many applications.