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Arizona State University’s Design for Remote Labs

Visit: Arizona State University’s design for remote labs

A video that describes several forms of remote labs, including evaluating the pros and cons of each format. It describes: virtual labs, in which students simulate the experience of working at a bench; asynchronous labs, in which students are sent a packaged lab to complete on their own time and at their own pace; kitchen labs, in which students perform a simple experiment with basic equipment available in any household; and synchronous labs, in which students are sent equipment but conduct the lab simultaneously, in front of their own computer, while being led by an instructor. A number of other resources are linked from this page.

Pros: A good place to start if you are wrestling with the initial complexities of how to transition a lab to an online environment.  Resources and suggestions are offered for both science-based labs as well as art, music, and performance studios in the humanities.

Cons: Lacks concrete suggestions about effective strategies to design your own virtual/asynchronous/kitchen/synchronous labs.

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Audacity

Audacity is a simple but flexible desktop audio recording software for podcasts or performances. It can be used with an external microphone or your computers microphone

Pros:  Free, simple to use. Cross platform

Cons:  Less powerful than Ardour

Expert: Alex Savoth, Charles Woodard

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WordPress and Web Sites

Haverford Sites provides students, faculty, and staff with the opportunity to register a domain name and create a digital presence through various mediums such as blogs, portfolios, and wikis. You can easily install open source applications such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, and Omeka to your own domain, and use this space to create your digital identity and express your creativity.

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Virtual Reality

The Spongy Bog 360 project is an example of experiential learning through virtual reality by the faculty of the Environment, the Centre for Teaching Excellence, and the Centre for Extended Learning at the University of Waterloo. This example includes learning outcomes, alignment of learning outcomes, pedagogical design, and clarity on student response.

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Ardour

Ardour

Ardour is a sophisticated digital audio workstation that allows multitrack recording of different sound sources with full editing and sound effects. 

It is almost free–pay what you want (as little as $1) and works on all platforms.

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Recording Video of Lectures and Presentations

Panopto or Zoom

You can record a lecture and share with your students online, either after delivering it live or instead of delivering it live. We suggest you record your presentations in Panopto or Zoom and share recordings via Moodle. You can either record directly into Panopto or use the Moodle Zoom link to send Zoom recordings to your Panopto course folder.

Zoom is a quick and easy way to record. However, if you already use Panopto, we recommend that for recording a traditional lecture. Panopto was designed for this purpose and thus Panopto has many useful features for capturing and replaying lectures. It will time stamp and index PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, allow you to insert questions into a lecture, and let students take notes or ask questions at a particular time stamp.

Loom

Loom is a free screencast extension for Chrome browser (all platforms) that allows users to make and save (locally or on Loom server).  Records screen, browser tab, camera, or any combination.  Audio records from computer microphone and browser.  

It is free, quick, and simple to use, but offers very limited editing capabilities (trimming video only).

Camtasia

Camtasia is a desktop platform for making professional quality screen casts, with extensive capture, media management and editing facility.

It is a very powerful software suite, but costs $160 for educator’s license and has a moderately steep learning curve. Perfectionists will likely spend a lot of time trying to make things… perfect.

Expert: Alex Savoth and Charles Woodard

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Online Learning Consortium Laboratories Module

The Online Learning Consortium laboratories module is a highly useful set of resources for anyone teaching laboratories in the Natural or Social Sciences. It’s one offered by the Online Learning Consortium in collaboration with Every Learner Everywhere, a network of higher education organizations supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Pros:

Among other contributions, it:

  • Suggests a set of revised learning goals and objectives when teaching virtual labs
  • Outlines potential obstacles when teaching online labs and how to address these
  • Provides a number of alternative, online activities to hands-on laboratory experiences; many of these are very intentionally interactive and collaborative among students
  • Best of all, it provides links to several online databases; free simulations; opportunities to contribute to a number of “citizen science projects” being conducted across the nation, and in different disciplines; ideas for “at home laboratory exercises”; data visualization resources; and searchable indexes of available, online laboratories and simulations.

Cons:

One drawback is that this set of resources primarily addresses labs in the Natural and Social Sciences, and less so in the Humanities. Nevertheless, the ideas offered here may generalize, to some extent, to studio-type courses.

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Peer Review with Moodle Forum

Moodle Forums provide a quick way for students to offer written commentary on each other’s ideas (as expressed in the rorums themselves or perhaps some other shared content they provide within Moodle or via some other platform. Students can start a thread with their work and ask others to reply with comments. Davidson College has created some nice instructions for doing peer review in groups with the forum. 

(If you are interested in peer review and revision linked to specific passages in a student’s work, you might instead want to use Google Docs, which allows for extensive commenting and editorial suggestions. However, if you have Bryn Mawr students, this might not work as well; Bryn Mawr does not give out Google accounts.)

Expert: Sharon Strauss

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Small Group Work in Moodle

Moodle will let you break your class into groups for collaborative work. These groups can then be used for discussion forums, Moodle assignments, and other activities. 

If you plan to have different sets of student groups for different activities, and to use the gradebook, you’ll need to also set up groupings of groups.  UMass Amherst has instructions for creating Groupings.