From the Sloan Consortium, whose web site is turning out to be a gold mine of solid higher ed distance learning research, come articles on teaching electronics and Chemistry through distance learning. They used multimedia simulations of electronics in the former case while resorting to kitchen chemistry assignments in the latter case. For both courses, distance learning students tested as well or better than their classroom counterparts.
Here’s a particularly delicious nugget:
Of particular interest is the fact that, as evidenced by the results of the procedural evaluation, distance learning students were at least as competent as their traditional counterparts in utilizing laboratory equipment such as beakers, graduated cylinders and electronic balances, despite the fact that this type of equipment was not available to them in their kitchens. It appears that in the case of the first semester introductory chemistry course, the laboratory goals can be achieved equally well by the distance learners doing the Kitchen Chemistry Laboratories at home as they can by students in traditional laboratories.
In some ways, this shouldn’t be surprising; K-12 science teachers do this kind of thing all the time because the schools can’t afford real equipment. I myself (in a prior life) had great success teaching middle school science using what was essentially a kitchen chemistry curriculum out of the University of Hawaii called FAST [PDF]. Likewise, high school teachers having been using virtual frogs in bio labs for years and years. Applying the same principles on a post-secondary level is not a huge leap, especially for 101-level courses. What’s interesting is that the methods, i.e., substituting real-world items in the student’s immediate environment when that’s possible and creating online simulations when it’s not, marry so well together in an e-learning environment as strategies for dealing with what is fundamentally an environment of low situational control for instructional designers.
