Lab-based learning is an essential and necessary part of any undergraduate chemistry curriculum as it incorporates necessary and required hands-on experiential learning. However, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic many students are learning from home rendering laboratory instruction a particular challenge. Options for instructors include third-party virtual and pre-recorded materials, at-home laboratories, and original pre-recorded or real-time options. With students reporting decreased engagement and increased mental health concerns while learning remotely, real-time online lab instruction offers the advantage of increased student-faculty engagement; that is, students have an experience as close to "normal" as they can get. Much focus has centred on the adaptation of laboratory experiments to suit remote instruction (see the recent issue of The Journal of Chemistry Education1 focused on this matter). However, in order to develop and adapt new and meaningful experiential learning remotely, one has to know the logistics of how to do so best. Here, we report the assessment of a variety of technological set-ups for real-time and pre-recorded original content looking at a variety of audio and video sources as well as one-camera and two-camera options. We intentionally selected equipment we had readily available and ensured our videos were as close to the student experience as possible by recording via a secondary computer signed into an online learning platform. We surveyed a small group of students to assess which set-up was preferred (72 % selected the two-camera option with a smartphone showing the instructor as a whole and a web camera pointing at the instructor's hands to pick up the nuance of the chemistry being performed) and report a series of recommendations based on experiences teaching with this set-up. Finally, we report a diversity of experiments for which this set-up was utilized including titrations, basic synthetic transformations, and purification techniques.

Assessment of technological set-up for teaching real-time and recorded laboratories for online learning

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.