DELTA: Laboratory Redesign Handbook

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LABORATORY Sa m

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REDESIGN HANDBOOK

HOW -TO

LESSONS LEARNED

BEST PRACTICES HANDBOOK

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Tip #1

Don’t call it an online lab, even if that’s what it is.

“People get their mental models from past experience”

Educational Technology department approached them to ask if they would consider teaching a blended or online lab.

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What about “online class?” Your mental model probably didn’t include a laboratory environment. Laboratory courses are hands-on and experiential. In higher education, the word online is often erroneously associated with courses that are easier, gamified, or heavy on simulated content, but definitely not experiential.

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hat image comes to mind when you think of the word “online”?

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(Susan M. Weinschenk, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People)

As a result, many in higher education shy away from any sort of eLearning or online model when developing laboratory courses, because in their past experiences, “online” has not been associated with the type of learning these instructors aim to provide.

At Missouri University of Science and Technology, investigations into redesigned laboratory courses began in late 2013. The first faculty approached were hesitant when instructional designers from the campus

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The instructional design team took this information and created a new name for these redesigned labs. At Missouri S&T, blended, flipped, and online labs are now developed as a part of DELTA – Delivering Experiential Labs to All. These labs reach students both on and off-campus, and some such courses have ended up as beautifully designed, pedagogically sound, courses with experiential components which take place outside of the traditional laboratory environment.

After changing the terminology from “online labs” to “DELTA labs,” there was a great increase in the number of laboratory

courses seeking redesign assistance from several departments in science and engineering across campus. And, the university gained recognition by entities such as the Online Learning Consortium (formerly the SLOAN Consortium) for effective practices in education (OLC 2015) and a nomination for the Teaching with Technology Award at the Focus on Teaching with Technology Conference (FTTC 2015) held annually by the University of Missouri St. Louis.

So, if you want instructors to give an online lab a try, don’t call it an online lab, even if that’s what it is.

Why not just call it an “online lab”

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Along with those slides, the really crafty instructor might also have linked to online simulations and tutorials. As such techniques and strategies were being developed, educators, in their never-ending love for labels, coined terms such as technology-enhanced or web-facilitated, blended or hybrid, flipped, and online classes.

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hink back to the innovative classroom of the early 21st century. In the year 2000, undergraduate students could be hopeful that their instructors would post their robust compilation of lecture slides on the Internet to help them prepare for an upcoming lecture.

In today’s classroom, we would hardly call posting lecture slides on the Internet “web-facilitated” instruction – it’s just what we (educators) do. And why wouldn’t we? How much of the content that our students are learning at the undergraduate level is not already online anyway? Posting content and resources online has become a normal part of instruction, not something new and innovative and someday, course design using today’s emerging technologies will be just a part of what we do as well.

Educators should all begin to embrace the notion that there will come a time when learning is just learning, no matter which tools facilitate the process, and when labels used to describe content delivery (blended, flipped, hybrid, etc.) are not nearly as important.

“..there will come a time when

learning is just learning, no matter which tools facilitate the process, and when labels used to describe content delivery are not nearly as important.”

(Amy Skyles, Instructional Designer: Missouri S&T)

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Tip #2

Design courses around specific goals and objectives for reaching those goals, not delivery models.

(University of Central Florida, Blended Learning Toolkit)

or for the next course, or even five years after course completion.

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Ask this question - What is really important in the course? The answers to that question, those essential course outcomes, are your goals.

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fter viewing a webinar or attending a conference, instructors are often invigorated and eager to try new techniques and methods of course delivery. It does not matter which model of course delivery has piqued their interest - blending, flipping, streaming, synchronizing, hybridizing, or any other model. What does matter is that when instructors wish to redesign any component of a course, that the instructional designers working with factuly are available to help the instructors refocus their attention on the goals of the course.

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“Before delving into the type of content or technology to incorporate in your blended course, charting the direction to pursue is fundamental.”

Course design often begins at the end, with such goals, and not with the delivery model. What are course goals? The goals of a well-designed course are those fundamental concepts which students need to really know and understand at the end of the course,

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Through backward design, the goals are then used to create specific and measurable learning objectives. After learning objectives have been created, instructors can align assessments with the goals and objectives in order to determine if all goals have been met. But, all of these steps must be completed before an instructor can decide on a delivery model.

Why? Because it is essential to know what information needs to be conveyed to the students before thinking about how to get that information to them.

DESTINATIONS & DELIVERY MODELS Not all delivery models work equally well for all goals and objectives.

Here’s an example: Imagine you live in Missouri and you are planning a surprise trip to visit your favorite uncle, who lives in a different state. You could take a car, but that’s boring, right?

During your planning, you see a documentary on trains and you are fascinated. Trains are awesome! You decide that you will ride a train to your uncle’s for a weekend visit.

But what if your uncle lives in Hawaii? In this case, the delivery model, the train, is not an acceptable model to accomplish your goal of visiting your uncle—you’re going to have to think of another delivery model!

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