How do I get students to get a ‘hands on’ type of lab experience at home, taking an online class? I first went through my list of topics and thought about what they needed to know and what they should be getting out of the ‘hands on’ lab experience (in the lab or at home). I also had to give up some things I feel is important, like actually working with a microscope. My first lab online was a lab about types of tissues in the body (BIO 201 Human Anatomy & Physiology I) and the hormone secreting glands (BIO 202 Human Anatomy & Physiology II). These both involved students looking at tissue slides through a microscope. OK, not a realistic thing to expect online students to have access to a microscope. There are three things I really need students to know when they are done with these labs (in the lab or online) when they are presented with a specific slide image. 1) be able to recognize where that image came from in the body. 2) know specific features from that image (e.g. collagen fibers or name of a cell). 3) describe what that tissue does or what that gland secretes.
If I let go of the importance of actually using a microscope and focus on what they need to know regarding the subject matter, then the vast array of quality photographic images available online become the primary resource for these labs. I created a lab report guide for students to follow. In that guide, I listed the tissues or glands they needed to find images for, then a list of features they needed to point out on those images, and finally a series of questions about each tissue relating to its function in the body. I left the report pretty open to allow students to be creative in how they made the report. They could have used Glogster or Prezi or Power Point or a word processor or any format that allowed them to show what I asked for in a way that made sense to them. I looked forward to seeing what the students would create.
The first semester I launched this online lab reporting I had them submit the report as a document or web link. They just had to attach it or post it to the assignment page in Blackboard where I could view it, write comments about their report and post their grade. This was great until I started grading the lab reports. The reports were mostly cut and paste jobs put into a word processor taken almost verbatim from Wikipedia with the image also provided on Wikipedia. That first round of grading did not go well as my comments included their plagiarized portions of the lab along with a warning note. Now I had to rethink this to get my students to actually ‘learn’ something from the lab (i.e. the actual purpose of doing the labs in the first place) rather than just making a ‘hoop they have to jump through’ where they only do what is listed with no attempt at gaining any knowledge from it. I had to then tighten up the report guidelines, which I hated to do because the good students did a remarkable job in finding great images and were very creative in their own way of presenting the material. The rest of the semester was a balancing act of making the report process rigid enough to force the less inclined students to gain the necessary experience and open enough to allow the creative students to generate a report that shows the depth that I had hoped for. Whew, now that semester was over, I had to rethink things. I was so impressed with many of the great reports that I thought that the other students should be able to see it and then they can also be inspired and motivated to improve or at least learn something from their fellow students.
The following semester, instead of having students submit their reports to the assignment page where I was the only one to see it, I had them post it to the designated blog for that topic in Blackboard. Then I made it a requirement that each student had to view and comment (including one constructive criticism and one complementary comment) on three fellow students lab reports. I thought that by forcing students to view other students works they would be inspired and also knowing that their reports were going to be viewed, they would be more motivated to present a better report (as if submitting a report to their instructor for a grade was not enough, which it wasn’t for some students). This improved things a great deal but for me when I did my portion of the grading, I still could not tell if the students ‘got it’ or if they just were better at paraphrasing.
My next change was to make the students ‘teach’ their fellow students. Instead of having students write reports, I wanted to hear them tell me about what they know. I took that part for granted when I would teach students on campus. I had a verbal interaction that allowed me more insight into where a student was on their learning process and I could better read what they needed from me. Online, I never even knew if they could pronounce the words. So, I decided their lab report should be a video. Same report outline but now they had to make a video that was ‘showing’ or ‘teaching’ the class about that topic. They still had to include all the tissues or glands on the list and the features and the actions. However now instead of bullet lists with attached images, they show an image on the screen and recorded their audio while pointing out what they are talking about. This helped a lot for me to get a better feel of where students were in their understanding. As anyone on our side of the desk knows, you learn more about the subject each time you teach it. Why not give students that opportunity? They posted their video as a link and their fellow students still had to view it and comment. This not only sparked better content demonstrations and many mini tutorials for other students to learn from but it broke down some of the online barriers and made students communicate in a more meaningful way.
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