A Lab is a Lab is a Lab…. Not!

April 6 2011 by Jake Frodsham in School Section |No Comments

So far I have not written much about what I do here at K¹². I am an instructional designer. This is like being an engineer, taking the material that is content, from wonderful experts like Dr. Dan Franck, and designing the best way to deliver this in our K¹² products. We have a wonderful team of instructional designers, like Jeff Pitcher with whom I have worked in developing virtual labs and videos, who are expert at doing this. For a moment, I am going to let you into our “instructional labs” to talk about science labs.

Since we first began making courses, a core belief that online learning does not mean 100% online instruction guided our approach to labs. Throughout our curriculum, you I am sure find that hands-on labs rule! We have gone to great lengths to design labs that can be done in many places and in many ways and help learners understand the fundamentals and wonder of science. I believe that for most students, hands on experiences are by far best!

But lets be honest. I remember being a student—I just wanted to SURVIVE the labs. Even though I was a teacher for 17 years, I will admit that when I was a student, I just wanted to get the lab done. That was MY purpose in doing the lab! So how can we help you get past that? More and more in our courses, especially in high school, you will see that we have introduced two exciting pieces: lab videos, and virtual labs.

Lab videos are meant to help ease the pain of assembling an apparatus and working through a procedure. In some cases, we show you lab results as well. One of the most important people in working through science labs was always my lab partner. I could check with them to see if I understood the lab properly, or if we were mutually lost. Our lab videos in a sense are your lab partner. They will not tell you everything that you want to know, nor do they do the lab for you, but they are there as well designed guides and yes, the voice in most is yours truly .

Virtual labs are also items that we have been adding in great numbers as of late, with over 30 new ones planned for our Fall 2011 courses. These are meant to fit into our lessons — they are not the lessons themselves. They are great data collection suites, designed to allow for authentic data gathering in a lab. Be careful—though they may LOOK like simulations, they actually are more like the real world where the results of experiments vary, and sometimes, if you do the lab incorrectly and break something, you will have to begin again! Sometimes, they allow us to help you work with apparatuses that you would not normally be able to receive in a home learning environment, such as large microphones, big sound tubes and momentum tracks. Most of the time, they are meant to help you understand the most important pieces of a lab, and make it easier to master the most important concepts.

If you are fortunate, you may already be taking a science course where lab videos and virtual labs are already appearing. By Fall, in most of our high school courses you will see many of these, as we are creating 19 lab videos and even more virtual labs! If you want a preview of how this all works together and actually have some fun building a little motor for yourself, I will be appearing with some other talented K¹² employees at the Philadelphia Science Festival, on April 16. At that time, you can build a motor, watch a video to help you, and play with our virtual lab where you can build an even fancier electric motor! Hopefully I will see you there! If you cant make it, then you can help me do my job better by answering the following question: which of our K¹² labs that you have done have you liked the best? I look forward to hearing your stories and to seeing some of you on April 16th—motor on!

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