ScienceThe COVID-19 report is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
In a normal summer, Appledore Island, a 39-hectare outcrop 12 kilometers off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, turns into a classroom. Students from high school to graduate level live indoors, eat in a community canteen, and work shoulder to shoulder to explore coastal and water biology in 18 courses organized by the Shoals Marine Laboratory. But this summer, with the growing pandemic, the students have stayed home.
Instead, a skeleton team at Appledore is broadcasting field trips and dissections of fish and invertebrates and setting up cameras to collect data for students. Instead of guiding students around the island, University of New Hampshire (UNH) coastal restoration ecologist Gregg Moore carries a backpack full of equipment: "a dual modem with two different cell carriers, a directional antenna that boosts the signal and a great source of direct current, "he says. The team allows 12 remote students, twice the usual course enrollment, to teach basic coastal ecology techniques.
Related
Moore's is just one of hundreds of online lab and field courses forced by COVID-19: "a seismic shift for those who were not yet involved in distance or online education," says Martin Storksdieck, education researcher scientist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. . Some researchers fear that students will miss certain practical and problem-solving skills and will not be able to judge whether a scientist's practical work is suitable for them. But instructors are developing high-tech ways to simulate field and laboratory experiences. "I would say [these courses] They are no Virtual, "says Jennifer Seavey, director of the Shoals Lab." They are real. "And some advantages are emerging. By reducing geographic and financial barriers, Seavey says," Virtual field courses are democratizing fieldwork. " The change has taken ingenuity. "Teachers must be creative and use a combination of what's available," including online videos and free or commercially available online labs, says Mildred Pointer, a physiologist at Howard University who is working at a Fall Course in General Biology No single tool meets all your needs, says Pointer.
As the pandemic gained momentum, emails flew among the leaders of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Many United States geology graduates must take a "final" field course to graduate. The cancellation of more than three-quarters of these courses jeopardized the graduation of many specialties. The association then invited instructors to develop learning objectives that did not depend on students doing fieldwork. She also compiled online exercises to help the 29 field courses that have moved online this summer. Lessons range from "Minecraft Orientation" to "Yosemite Valley Geology," which includes a 43-stop Google Earth tour with photos and embedded text.
Like Moore, geoscientist Jim Handschy wanted to give remote students "as close to real experience as possible." He runs the Indiana University Judson Mead geological field station in Montana, which had enrolled 60 students before classes were canceled in March. He and some instructors visited each outcrop on their course plan, filmed the rocks and landscape, and captured magnified views of samples. Each week the class delves into the rock layers and their history. For their final project, students digitally map a landscape of 3,100 hectares.
Shannon Dulin, a geologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who has just finished teaching a field course, sees the value in learning to study a landscape without stepping on it. In their class assessments, their students said they acquired unexpected skills. "And these are skills they are going to need on the job," he adds, as geologists are increasingly asked to evaluate sites they don't visit.
In other fields, hands-on learning takes place in laboratories. Students usually work in pairs and share teams, "so there are a lot of problems with virus transmission," says Heather Lewandowski, a physicist at the University of Colorado (CU), Boulder. At your university this fall, lab exercises as diverse as building an electrical circuit or analyzing data from solar flares are likely to be completely remote.
Fortunately, physics already had a foot in the world of virtual laboratories, especially in CU. There, in 2002, Nobel laureate Carl Wieman developed the interactive physical education technology (PhET) simulation project to provide "games" that teach students basic physics concepts. The PhET web portal now has 106 physics-based simulations and another 50 or so for other disciplines. It became a place to go this spring for teachers to move to online teaching; traffic multiplied by five, says director Katherine Perkins.
Additionally, several universities have adopted a portable device called iOLab that is rented for $ 50 per semester. With it, students can measure magnetism, light intensity, acceleration, temperature, gravity, and atmospheric pressure, and do basic physics experiments at home. "They like us to trust them and not just give them instructions," says iOLab inventor and physicist Mats Selen of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Lewandowski and colleagues surveyed physics instructors and students about their experiences and published their findings on arXiv, the physics preprint server, on July 2. Respondents said that online labs work best when projects are open and online class meetings are kept small. They complained of technical difficulties, that students had uneven access to the Internet and materials, and longer preparation times for both students and instructors. But they reported that they could meet most of the key learning objectives, says Lewandowski, even though "there are many things we can't replicate in remote experiments," such as building vacuum chambers or problem-solving teams.
Some institutions decided this spring that virtual simply would not work. The Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts simply canceled its summer courses. "MBL courses are recognized worldwide for the intensity of the practical nature of laboratory work," says director Nipam Patel. Students spend long hours with famous teachers and do their own projects using locally collected organisms. "We feel that it would be extremely difficult to replicate these experiences as a virtual laboratory course."
Other institutions will try a combination of in-person and virtual labs. Suely Black, a professor of chemistry at Norfolk State University, expects only half of her students to be in the lab each week this fall, while the other half will be in online classes analyzing data and writing reports. "The crisis has led us to evaluate more critically the activities that students must experience in the laboratory," he says.
Likewise, this fall, University of Michigan (UM) organic chemistry students Ann Arbor will rotate the lab in small groups, giving everyone an insight into the hands-on experience. Personal protective equipment is standard for this course and all work is done in hoods with excellent air exchange, so "they are really fully protected," says UM biochemist Kathleen Nolta.
Storksdieck, an advocate of online learning, questions the value of smelling fumes or using a pipette. "We have to ask ourselves if everything that has been taught so far was so good," he says. Dominique Durand, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University, says that after putting a fully online biomedical engineering master's program 5 years ago, he concluded that problem solving was more important than practical experience. And the ecologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Erika Zavaleta, believes that virtual courses will open up field work to many more students. "There are things you can do online that you can't do in person," she adds, such as visiting as many places as possible while driving.
Still, Handschy regrets that his geology students don't have the 12-hour immersive interactions between each other and the faculty that past classes have had. Natalie White, a third-year student at UNH who took Moore's Appledore course last year, agrees: "You don't have all the time in between when you walk around the island and you can ask impromptu questions." Appledore Island is the source of some of your best memories. "I think they are missing out on the community."
