Re: Online Labs

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

This is a very good question.  It is not clear that one can mount online
labs that can be as effective as actual labs with equipment.  The paper by
Heather Brasell showed that labs with motion detectors can be extremely
beneficial in helping students learn kinematics.  Bob Beichner pioneered
video analysis, but claims that it is not as effective as actual labs with
equipment.  I understand that he now says they have an effectiveness in
between actual labs and paper and pencil tasks.  The evidence for
effectiveness is for research based exploration and NOT for conventional
verification labs.

If these results are accepted, then it may not be possible to mount labs
over the net with the same effectiveness of labs with equipment.  It may be
possible, however, to have some labs with better effectiveness as paper and
pencil tasks, just not as effective as with equipment.  As an experiment I
translated some of the Tools for Scientific Thinking labs for use with a web
simulation.  In effect the student moves the mouse rather than his/her body.

They are available at
http://www.hal-pc.org/~clement/TST/TST_Motion_Simulations.html .  You can
purchase the accompanying lab sheets from Vernier Software www.vernier.com .

Physlets are designed to be used over the net.  For more information about
some available simulations see:
http://www.hal-pc.org/~clement/science.htm  Some of the simulations can be
used as the basis of a lab.  Physlets are available at
http://webphysics.davidson.edu/Applets/Applets.html

Whether of not it is possible to mount a completely online course with gain
equivalent to a well designed lab course is IMHO still not decided.  In
either case a good course needs to use existing material which has proven to
be effective such as TST labs, Real Time Physics labs ... or a cycle of
development and testing is necessary to mount a truly effective online
course.  On the other hand, conventional verification labs are so
ineffective that doing away with them would probably not change the
effectiveness of a course.  Online simulations such as Physlets might help
make an online course more effective with suitably crafted labs, or video
labs could be used with videos of motion.  Widely available packages for
video labs are Videopoint and World-in-Motion for PCs, or VideoGraph for
Macs.  Of the three I would not choose World-in-Motion because I feel that
it is vital for students to see more than 1 graph at a time.  Students must
see position, velocity, and acceleration side by side to be able to
appreciate the differences between them.

My bias is to say that it is not at this point in time possible to mount an
online course with as much gain in conceptual understanding as a well
crafted classroom course.  However, the average classroom course could
easily be translated to a web based course with little change in the already
low conceptual gain that they generally have.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> Does anyone do introductory labs online?
> How do you handle an online physics course?
>
> Tina