Department: Chemistry

Team: Dr Peter Rayner, Dr David Pugh, Alison Harding, Anna Wilkinson 

Summary

This project will take a student as partners approach to co-creating a suite of online instructional and interactive videos for the teaching of practical chemistry skills. The outcome of this will be an inclusive resource for students to freely access in addition to embedding the videos into compulsory pre-lab activities to improve student experience and outcome.

The teaching of practical chemistry skills is an essential element of all modern chemistry degree programs, required for degree accreditation. The heart of any practical curriculum is the time students spend in a laboratory conducting a range of experiments. Modern large cohort sizes have placed increased pressure on both timetabling and teaching and learning requirements. To ensure the most fruitful use of these precious laboratory hours, we have developed the use of online pre-laboratory work to prepare students for the skills and techniques that they will encounter during their day in the laboratory. These weekly activities include tasks such as conducting necessary calculations, considering hazards and safety implications and effective planning of laboratory time. An identified weakness of our current pre laboratory work is the use of historic videos that are of varying quality and accuracy whilst also presenting broad inaccessibility issues.

Final report