Abstract
Before attending any laboratory courses, students are required to learn about the safety issues and potential chemical and health hazards. However, students are often bored and cannot remain focused in a safety training session through the traditional one-way lecture teaching style. Students have low awareness of the importance of the laboratory safety. Owing to have the same Chemistry theme in the key foundation courses, this proposed project will be a collaboration between the Chemistry Department and the School of Pharmacy, and aim to develop an effective and interactive teaching method for laboratory safety training sessions with the assistance of modern teaching technology in order to enhance students’ safety awareness and provide the necessary knowledge of the hazards associated with different chemicals and the proper steps for protecting themselves in the lab. The designed interactive learning platform will be accessible by students from both departments, which can be considered as a cost-effective development.
Through a gamification teaching and learning approach, the increased incentive of learning under a more interactive atmosphere is expected to facilitate the training of their problem-solving. Furthermore, the provided safety videos/animations, simulations and interactive gamification website will also attract student interests outside the traditional classroom. This project will serve as a “kickstarter” project for our future development on the virtual undergraduate laboratory courses to provide training for all basic laboratory skills in order to assist them in experiential learning courses.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
This project is a collaboration between the Chemistry Department and the School of Pharmacy and aims to develop an effective and interactive teaching method for laboratory safety training sessions with the assistance of modern teaching technology to enhance students’ safety awareness, provide the necessary knowledge of the hazards associated with chemicals and the proper steps to protect themselves in the lab. Through this teaching and learning approach, the increased incentive of learning under a more interactive atmosphere is expected to facilitate the training of their problem-solving skills. Furthermore, the provided safety videos/animations and interactive game-mode website will also attract student interests outside the traditional classroom. This project will serve as a “kickstarter” project for our future development on virtual undergraduate laboratory courses to provide training for all basic laboratory skills to assist them in experiential learning courses.
Activities, process and outcomes
We have purchased 350 student licenses from the Labster and implemented part of the licenses for the students who attend the courses of “Transition Metal Chemistry Laboratory” (CHEM3860) and “Fundamentals of Pharmaceutical Chemistry” PHAR1110 (around 120 students) in the 2nd semester of AY2021-22 to train students about the laboratory safety concepts through the simulation learning. We hired a company to develop an interactive webpage including the major concepts and descriptions about selected topics with questions and answers sections, which can help to evaluate students’ understanding for each topic.
Deliverables and evaluation
The project has been implemented to two courses, which are CHEM3860 – Transition Metal Chemistry Laboratory (2nd term of AY2021/22) and PHAR1110 – Fundamentals of Pharmaceutical Chemistry (2nd term of AY2021/22), respectively. This implementation involves about 110 undergraduate students, who are either Year 1 (PHAR1110) or Year 3 (CHEM3860) students. Students showed great enthusiasm on the use of Labster on helping them to learn about the experimental science during the lockdown. Labster can also raise their interest about the experimental science and enhance their engagement on this course. Labster is demonstrated to be a good interactive learning platform to help students develop their self-learning skills. In general, most students agreed that Labster is a user-friendly learning platform and they admired more about the experimental concepts (ranked 1st), built-in quizzes (ranked 2nd) and multiple attempts (ranked 3rd), which is a surprising result. Students obviously cared much about the content of the experiment and they also welcomed challenges from the quizzes. The project team believed the multiple attempts is crucial for students to develop a good habit of continuous self-learning. Students showed a strong willingness to recommend Labster to their fellow classmates and agreed it is a worthwhile purchase as a learning tool to support their study.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
Owing to the pandemic and the project is still under implementation and data collection, this project is yet to be shared within the department or to the university. In 2022, the project team will look forward to joining the CUHK Teaching and Learning Innovation ExPo to share our project and receive comments and suggestions from the colleagues during the event.
Impact on teaching and learning
This project uses an interactive game-mode teaching approach to enhance critical thinking and problem-solving skills of the students. The usage of game-mode learning platform and virtual experimental simulation is demonstrated to provide wonderful opportunities for flipped classrooms and assist students in remote self-learning of practical skills in view of the restrictions of face-to-face experiential learning caused by the pandemic. The employment of interactive game-mode learning platform is shown to enhance students’ self-learning and awareness on the laboratory safety issues and to strengthen the students’ engagement in the corresponding courses. This project also leads to a more diverse assessment scheme, in addition to just traditional tests or quizzes, for gauging students’ performance during the course.
