September 2001 — Features
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The Viability of Distance Education Science Laboratories
- Students must have enough control of lab equipment to start and stop an experiment and make appropriate adjustments.
- The experiment should be no more difficult to conduct than with the equipment physically present.
- Students need appropriate feedback.
By satisfying these requirements, the key elements of experimental design and error analysis remain viable student learning goals.
Key impediments to the growth of distance labs are the absence of an educational model for distance science laboratories, the lack of delivery technology standards for instrument hardware and software, and the considerable technical difficulty and expense of development. Due to the lack of standard development practices and technologies, a pessimistic view that distance laboratories are not worth the effort and expense may be understandable. However, we believe that with a general development approach based on technically simple and familiar tools, and a distance education model based on sound pedagogical principles, selected distance labs can be developed that compare favorably with traditional laboratories in development effort, expense and student learning.
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The most promising and technologically simple approach for distance lab development to date uses a standard spreadsheet application with access to distant instruments over a network. Spreadsheets have long been used in science laboratories to analyze data, but require some minor modifications to access instruments due to the lack of instrumentation standards.
For the instructor, such a familiar and relatively easy-to-use approach lowers learning costs and effort in creating a lab. To create a lab, the instructor might do a few of the preliminary lab steps, such as how to get data from a distant instrument into the spreadsheet, leaving the remaining steps of performing the experiment and data analysis to the student. Using such a general tool, a student can then open the same spreadsheet from a Web page at home or in the traditional lab setting, and essentially pick up where the instructor stopped. Students have the freedom to choose their own investigative approach, much as in a traditional lab. As in a traditional lab, students would need to determine appropriate parameters for the measurement instrument and adjust for errors. Instructions, graphics or audio can also be provided with the spreadsheet on the Web page.
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In the following examples, the instrumentation involved was relatively inexpensive – less than $300 each for Vernier software, well within the reach of most high school and introductory college laboratories. Note that all examples can be done with a standard spreadsheet, although some were initially implemented as a computer program before recognizing the spreadsheet potential for distant laboratories.
The first example involves a physics experiment in which students made noise to study the frequency of sound. A microphone captured sound waves that were digitized and inputted into a computer.
