In a heart of spring, there is an online teaching fling
Living and working in 21st century means by default to be working in a digital environment and being able to respond in that manner to all the challenges surging from daily work, work and personal communication etc.
With that being said, an online classes shouldn't represent a big issue, or a major problem, especially since everyone in working community enter in one by having an excellent IT skills as a must have even before reaching second or third step in hiring process.
Still, with coronavirus pandemic, we all seem to be struggling or at least questioning our previous understanding of teaching online.
Teaching someone theoretically seems to be quite present on an online platform, with Zoom, Skype, and other programs and softwares available for such purpose.
My question is how to provide online classes for practice classes suited for performance inside a laboratory with specific equipment and laboratory controlled conditions?
Subject I teach my students this semester is precisely tailored this way - they learn by working in a laboratory and performing experiments under my supervision and guidance.
In order to continue with this, even in time of Covid19, we have constructed and prepared physics experiments for students, to be performed at home with what they have at home. We do the experiments and film it and post it on YouTube. Hence the students can perform the same experiments by themselves and send individually full report with data for every single experiment to be evaluated by the teacher. So far, this method has been successful and quite a good replacement for experiments in laboratory.
One of those experiments is finding half-life time of beer as an surrogate for finding half-time of radioactive material. Firstly, because physical laws for both are the same, and secondly, students cannot work with radioactive material at home. Of course, this is adaptation of first experiment of this kind conducted in USA and afterwards in UK. Nevertheless, it works, effectively.
I hope that this can be useful for other physics teachers struggling in this time with experimental part of subject.
L&D | Leadership Development | Higher Ed
4yI love this! We are facing the same challenge as you: how to teach practical skills and conduct simulation-based activities at home. In addition to using scenario-based learning, this is exactly what I would recommend - adapt the activities - some of them can surely be done at home. Do you ask all your students to conduct the experiments and then send you the reports? Are those only learning activities or also assessments?