Atlanta – Can online science laboratories replace the experience of sitting at a lab bench with beaker in hand? No way, say many professors. But Kemi Jona, director of Northwestern University’s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships, argues that virtual labs are at least as good, and in some cases better, at teaching students concepts to prepare them for modern laboratory research.
He’s a leader of iLabCentral, an effort by colleges to share their high-end scientific instruments with professors and high-school science teachers over the Internet to support virtual science labs. The project is run by Northwestern and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and supported by a $1-million grant from the National Science Foundation.
In a presentation to leaders of the Southern Regional Education Board here Wednesday during its meeting on emerging technologies, Mr. Jona demonstrated the system, performing a laboratory experiment about detecting radiation. He gained access to a Webcam pointed at a Geiger counter in a lab at the University of Queensland, in Australia. He entered a few simple instructions via a Web-based form, requesting that the Geiger counter take measurements at three different distances from a radiation source. A minute or two later, the instrument shown on the Webcam buzzed to life, moving to each of the assigned settings and taking the readings.
“This is our experiment,” said Mr. Jona. “We submitted that.”
That particular lab exercise is designed with high-school students in mind. Some of the experiments in the iLabCentral project are aimed at college students.
Mr. Jona said the system gives students access to equipment they might not otherwise get to tinker with. And instructors don’t have to spend time setting up or cleaning up after the experiments.
He noted that many organizations and professors are still not convinced that lab classes can be done virtually, but he is trying to change that. He plans to meet with the College Board soon to try to persuade them to accept virtual labs in their Advanced Placement courses.
“The high-school science lab of the future is this,” he said, holding up his laptop computer.
7 Responses to New Project Promotes Virtual Science Labs, Despite Skepticism
allens - December 10, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I’m perfectly willing to see this for non-biology labs. Students need to be required to do biology labs hands-on, with dissections included, because otherwise those who want to reject animal experimentation will be able to keep benefiting from animal experimentation’s results. (Yes, not passing high school – or community college – biology is a relatively mild penalty compared with, say, not being able to get medical care based on animal experiments. But the latter is a lot less likely to happen as a penalty for animal rights activism.)
cwinton - December 11, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Of the five senses of touch, sound, taste, smell, and sight, a computer only addresses 2, and then with significant degradation. This approach may have its uses, but only as a supplement, not a substitute.
rcoulson - December 11, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I support this approach. I was skeptical when Medical Schools, beginning twenty years ago, began to drop labs in Biochemistry and Physiology. I have since experienced the success of student learning using alternative learning modalities including computer aided and directed experiences. I have even seen it work well even for human gross anatomy dissections.I see no need to confuse the importance of animal experimentation for research with the modality of laboratory instruction for students.
chemteach - December 11, 2009 at 12:24 pm
As a chemistry instructor, I equate virtual lab with watching cooking shows. You can learn a lot by watching cooking shows, but until you get into the kitchen and actually cook, you can’t really call yourself a cook. For better or for worse, actual lab preparation and cleanup are all part of the learning. I want my students to experience wearing goggles and gloves as they work with real chemicals. I agree that there are dangerous experiments that are best demonstrated virtually, but the majority of lab still needs to be hands-on. Students need to experience real bacteria, plants, animals, crystals, rocks, chemicals, stars, moons,shooting stars, electronic components,nanotechnology, and instrumentation (even when it breaks; that’s a lesson too.) However, my real pet peeve with virtual labs, is the lack of excitement over science that students will experience. In discussing with science colleagues why they went into science, it is very common for them to say they had a junior high or high school teacher that provided great laboratory experiences. I count myself among that group. When thinking of your own science classes in your education, do you remember the lectures or the labs? If you had a poor teacher who didn’t do any labs, you probably don’t remember anything about science class except that you hated it.
harrykeller - December 11, 2009 at 2:51 pm
As a one-time chemistry professor in a large university, I strongly support appropriate usage of virtual labs in science. Remote robotic labs are one valid approach for some experiments. Simulations, as you’ll see below, are not.Before passing judgment on this concept, you should consider two things: the target student audience and the goals of the lab.Certainly, science majors should have as much real lab time as possible. They will have to take more advanced labs that require skills developed in earlier labs.Students who are not majoring in science have no use for learning how to titrate with a buret or manipulate a microscope or dissect a pig. Getting some kinesthetic experience is a good thing and so is the opportunity to design experiments. These two aspects of the hands-on labs do not come readily in virtual labs. Incidentally and importantly, experiment design is often not a part of hands-on labs.Therefore, it makes most sense to provide some hands-on labs for the non-science majors and allow other excellent lab experience as well.The key word here is “excellent.” Most virtual labs provide no real science experience. The data that students collect has been preprogrammed and is very precise and “clean.” Thus, the student experience is exactly the opposite of what a good lab provides.The iLab concept is one way of overcoming this problem and of providing real data from the real world to students. The best lab experience will provide students with learning opportunities not available from lectures, textbooks, and videos. Students should understand the nature of science, develop scientific reasoning skills, and appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of the work that scientists do.The best lab experience will have students collecting data one point at a time just as in a typical lab setting. These data will be full of random and systematic error and may even be completely wrong on occasion because of equipment failure or improper set up.The conclusions drawn from data should not be known in advance and should not always be obvious.Inquiring about things you don’t know, exploring to find out information about them, and discovering new ideas are all fun for students. They’re mostly young and like challenges as long as those challenges aren’t too extreme.I have pioneered another, somewhat parallel, concept to the iLab idea. I have been working for ten years to provide a series of prerecorded real experiments with highly interactive online software that allows students to take their own individual data point by point. You can see more at http://www.smartscience.net.While the data are delayed in time, the presentation is very real, and the data are also very real with the same sorts of errors you’d expect with any experiment.Because our target audience is not college science majors, we’ve removed most of the procedural work except when the procedure impacts significantly on understanding the experiments. Instead, we’ve focused on the science.Most virtual labs (iLabs being a prominent exception) are simulations and misrepresent science when used as lab substitutes. Certainly, use simulations to help understand content, but don’t replace good (or potentially good) labs with them. I’m talking about labs where you collect and analyze data here — just to get the definition of lab straight. The term “lab” often is used quite loosely.Just to reiterate, deciding on how to deliver optimal lab experience to your students depends on the audience and your lab goals. One size does not fit all. Make the decisions about your lab goals first. Then, seek lab experiences that achieve those goals. For the non-science major, lab equipment manipulation would not be an appropriate goal.
educationfrontlines - December 12, 2009 at 4:54 pm
1. The most meaningful definition of an organism or a physical entity is the actual material or phenomenon itself, not a mediated abstraction. Surveys of what is remembered from science classes find students recall the multisensory, hands-on experiences.2. Real material is truly interactive, as mentioned by #2, cwinton above. “Interaction” via a computer keyboard is a trivial use of the term, and completely unrelated to the genuine interaction of touching and manipulating the Geiger counter equipment, or an earthworm or a snake. 3. Real science is test-truthful, including all the pitfalls of setting it up wrong. The iLab may be a distance connection to a real lab setup generating real-time or delayed-time data, but the lessons of real labs include fruit-fly crosses that result in not just perfect 3-to-1 crosses but 0-to-0 crosses because you got the food media too diluted. Science equipment takes practice to set up, and both majors and non-majors need to know that. Especially in biology, emergent properties and complexity prevent perfect outcomes, and the U.S. suffers from a population that expects a perfect baby everytime, and sues when nature happens.4. Learning-how-to-observe involves practice in set-up and combining reasoning with hands-on knowledge of the properties of equipment. Today, too many students want the perfect set-up handed to them, and such majors will have developed few skills to move to advanced new work. Non-majors will underestimate the work and creativity necessary of specialists. Pasteur and Koch would dispare at separating “procedures” from “science.” Indeed most science breakthroughs had to await the development of those mere “procedures.” 5. I have been alarmed at the new generation of doctors’ lack of microscope and anatomy training, their abstract “learning” of pathologies and in some cases general technique. But even among the non-majors, all of whom become patients, we are suffering as a society due to lack of first hand learning about needle-stick, serious infections, and consequences of lacking modern hygiene, water chlorination, etc. Because the public no longer has this direct experience base (and televised media have in no way effectively replaced that experience) we now have an anti-vaccination public that, had today’s attitudes predominated in the early 1950s, would prevent us from eradicating polio and smallpox. Patients (non-majors) are uncomforable with palpation and other procedures because they have not had well-taught genuine anatomy labs. This lack of experience results in lack of donors for blood, organs, etc.6. Being confident in driving skills, or not-squeemish with blood or feces takes real, not mediated experiences. At least half of the next population will have to change diapers, and they can only become naturalized to this by actually doing it—no online lab or simulation will come close. (Same applies to meat processing, surgery, blood, etc.) Life requires “lab goals” far wider than are being discussed above.7. Many of those non-majors could switch to become majors if they become excited about the real science, and that means the real labs. We have no way of knowing which of our non-majors may convert. Giving non-majors different “lab goals” reduces the pipeline. Reality does “fit all.”8. Real labwork has real consequences. Drive home at 80 mph on the superhighway and encounter a recent accident with the victims being extracted and hauled away in an ambulance, and you will sober up and drive slower the rest of your trip. Watch a foreign train disaster with far more casualties on TV that night and you won’t be affected at all. Real labs have immediacy and real consequences. We have had half a century of experience with the ineffectiveness of media. 9. Real labwork increases involvement. Counting radiation for your tooth X-ray is involving. Conducting an abstract similar exercise at a distance is not. Detecting their blood types now is inherently interesting. Detecting some generic blood type elsewhere is not. 10. Science is universsal because it is based in real labwork. Lysenko would love online and simulated labs. He was born 50 years too early; today, he could keep his Lamarckianism alive.Aready, you can access and download alternative “science” on creationism etc., showing “evidence” for their views. 25 years ago, textbooks said the heart expanded from blood flowing into the heart. But students observing a turtle vivisection knew that the heart still expanded after the vena cava was severed. Today we know the expansion is cross-cell hydraulics. So textbooks have to be revised, and so must online and simulated demonstrations. But the lab has all the “truth” in it “for the looking.” I believe it was Woody Allen who said that “Reality may be overrated, but it is still the only place to get a good steak.” Reality is also the only place to do science and teach science. John Richard Schrock
harrykeller - December 14, 2009 at 11:18 pm
So, John Richard Schrock, you would consider the Mars Rover as not being “real science.” Why? Because the scientists don’t get to gasp for breath in the thin oxygen-deprived atmosphere? Because they don’t feel the gritty Mars soil between their fingers?Your ten examples of sophistry don’t change what real science is. Remote laboratories are real. Not being there does not make the science suddenly unreal. MIT’s iLaba are not created from a programmer’s keyboard. The science is as real as it gets.Playing with beakers is not necessarily science. Science is exploring the real world using any tools available. How many experiments did Einstein actually do? Get with the program!We’re not talking simulations here. Simulations are faked science. Remote labs and prerecorded real experiments are real science. Don’t try to equate them with simulations.