Abstract:
This talk will outline a new teaching pedagogy in chemical education developed for advanced laboratory courses that rely on specialized analytical instruments accessible only in the physical laboratory. Our approach centers on using cloud-enabled instrumentation software on “Virtual Machines” (VMs) which are accessible, on demand, to all students simultaneously, at any computer, at any time. Such access addresses many of the inherent limitations of the traditional teaching laboratory experience by giving students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the actual experimental “dash board”, prior to their laboratory time, thereby empowering them to become more confident and self-sufficient in their in-lab explorations. During VM training, students practice with the software at their own computer, working in small groups under the instructor’s direct guidance. As a result, they seem to display a higher level of engagement and active-learning during lab and also extend their learning via repeated self-engagement with the instrument software beyond the class time, in contrast to traditionally trained students who are more likely to await help. This talk will share our experiences over the past two years where we were used VMs in two different advanced chemistry laboratory courses at Boston University. The first is a course on instrumental analysis that uses VMs frequently as a teaching tool; the second is a traditional biochemistry laboratory course where analytical instrumentation is used for end-of-course capstone projects. We will discuss our preliminary observations and survey results on the impact this approach had on student-learning as well as on the roles and responsibilities of the instructors and teaching fellows involved. As an inherently scalable, low cost approach, VM training provides a unique path for educating the next generation of chemists and merits the careful validation and assessment efforts which we are currently undertaking.