Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: Using LAMS in Science

By: Peter Miller

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We run day-long labs in Years 1 and 2 that typically have a mix of wet and dry elements. I can only speak for the class that I run.

Q. Do students have computer access before and during prac classes?

A. Yes (their own and university clusters) and Yes (but less so, a small cluster and a few wifi laptops).

Q. Do they commonly share their results with other students?

A. Yes -- it is a fairly common strategy to get students to collate their data, sometimes replicates for statistical purposes, sometimes protocol variants as part of a factorial design.

Q. Are they encouraged to discuss each others results?

A. I'm sure it would be good if they did but I think this is less common, at least with large classes. It's something I'm moving towards.

Q. Do teachers have time to access student work before they come to class?

A. I wish I did but I don't! Again, class size and teaching load are issues.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: Peter Miller

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Just noticed that dotLRN has a survey facility. Nice to chat on this topic but worth considering maybe for others.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: Bronwen Dalziel

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Thanks for your feedback Peter.

How big is a prac group normally? We would run a prac of around 120 students, but there would be around 20-25 students per demonstrator.

Pracs would typically have a 1 hour tutorial followed by 4 hours experimental work. There are 2 banks of about 15 computers for processing results. I know this set up was considered expensive by the department and the number of pracs has recently been halved.

Transferring the cost of the tutorials (at around $70/25 demonstrators/week) over to a LAMS format would already be saving a lot of money. Not that the demonstraotrs (PhD students) would be too thrilled.

I will try to work up a real prac soon to show how I think LAMS can be used.

I will also talk to Robyn about setting up a survey for this topic.

Thanks again.

Posted by Bronwen Dalziel

By: Peter Miller

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Q. How big is a prac group normally? We would run a prac of around 120 students, but there would be around 20-25 students per demonstrator.

A. Similar size: 110-160, 3 staff + 5 demonstrators, runs twice in 6-week slots, full-day each Thursday! I'm not claiming this is typical.

Not sure that I want to replace wet labs entirely for obvious reasons. Using LAMS to get students involved in experimental design is one objective I have but didn't realise this year.

Generically we also use computers on the course for data collation, image processing and simulation (slime mould signalling with the Laub-Loomis model). The latter would be a good target too.

Posted by Peter Miller