Teaching an Instrumental Analysis Laboratory Course without Instruments During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Albert D. Dukes III ^[1]
  1. [1] Lander University

     Lander University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Journal of chemical education, ISSN 0021-9584, Vol. 97, Nº 9, 2020, págs. 2967-2970
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The COVID-19 pandemic presented numerous challenges for all levels of the education system. In March 2020, virtually all colleges and universities in the United States moved all instruction to an online environment as a result of the pandemic. While this posed challenges for all faculty, it posed a particular challenge for those faculty members who taught laboratory courses. By their nature, laboratory courses are a hands-on experience for students, and shifting them to an online format will necessarily change what students will do during their laboratory experience. In this reflection, the difficulties that were encountered in switching an Instrumental Analysis lab course to an online format will be discussed. The ideas deployed to address these challenges included providing current students with data collected by students in previous years and assigning them simulations to allow them to collect their own data. Some of the methods employed were more successful than others, but none of them were able to completely replicate the experience they would have received by actually being in the lab and conducting the analysis themselves. In the process of attempting to teach Instrumental Analysis in an online environment, it has become obvious that the time that students typically perceive as downtime where they do not see anything happening is important to their understanding of the data they collect.