Background to the problem
First level students in first semester are required to report on eight experimental exercises during the 14 week semester. As there are four weekend schools during this time, students needed, in the past, to complete two laboratory exercises at each weekend school.
These exercises could be completed in a time of 4–5 hours, but science laboratory work was not the only commitment of students during the weekend school. As a consequence, exercises were often rushed, "so I can get to another lecture"; or incomplete, "I went to another class and couldn't get back"; or performed poorly, "I didn't get a chance to check that". The problems were compounded if, through sickness or work commitments, a student missed a weekend school. Then four practical exercises needed to be done at the next weekend school, two of them a month out of step with the theory.
Many local students became disenchanted, but, even more significantly, interstate students found it impossible to enrol in science units. With only the local market as potential clientele, numbers enrolling by distance education in science units at MUCG showed little increase.
Options for solving the problem
The first and most obvious solution would be to significantly reduce the practical component of the course. This was philosophically and educationally unsatisfactory and dismissed as an easy but non viable solution.
A second possibility was to make use of the TV and video facilities of most homes to provide videos of the exercises for students to watch. This had some merit, as it meant that students would at least see the equipment in action even though they really had no hands on experience.
A third option was to provide a kit to each student, along with detailed instructions for its use. The kit could contain all the necessary apparatus for each experiment. This would be ideal but very expensive!
A fourth option was to establish study centres and provide these with the equipment and personnel to enable the students to do the experiments when they could get to the study centres. Again this would provide an adequate solution but would be as costly and impractical as equipping a mobile lab and touring around student centres.
Eventually a combination of the first three options was adopted, a combination of kit and video instruction and the practical requirement reduced from eight exercises to seven. This enabled students to better pace themselves at two weeks per exercise, and allowed us to evaluate the relative responses of the students to these differing formats.
The kit with video option
The kit components were packaged in a moulded foam insert in a Reflex copier paper box and mailed to students upon receipt of a deposit of $100. Included in the kit were two analog multimeters, a digital multimeter, a capacitor/resistor box, resistance wire, leads, terminals, etc, and a video tape of instructions. The first three experimental exercises involved use of the voltmeter-ammeter method for determining high medium and low resistance and evaluating the alternative circuits, construction and use of a Wheatstone bridge, and using the charge and discharge of an RC circuit to investigate capacitance, time constants and Kirchhoff's laws.
Two exercises were demonstrated completely on video with measurements and readings clearly provided so that the student only had to process them correctly. The remaining two exercises were demonstrated clearly so that all instruments could be read by the viewer, but it was up to the student to take the readings as he or she thought fit, before applying and processing them in the experimental report.
Student response
The student response was universally favourable, with some extreme cases of appreciation. The favoured system was the entirely student operated kit, closely followed by the student read video, with the video demonstration an acceptable but poor third.
Most comments referred to the sense of achievement at being able to construct one's own equipment and circuitry and have it work! All referred to the pleasant experience of being able to take their time to think and reason things out without a timetable for the next class in the back of their mind. It was interesting to hear students who had attended other units talking of their trials, tribulations and failed attempts on the way to success.
The video student measurements were slightly less popular, as some felt that they would have liked to press the buttons for themselves, as in the kit exercises and some even remarked that they thought that they could have done better than the demonstrator. It was interesting to note that a slight editing error was picked up by almost every student, indicating the degree of attention that had been paid to the tape and the care necessary by the staff in producing it.
The demonstration videos with measurements provided were not felt to be very exciting as the challenge element was missing.
Results of the system
All told 40 kits were sent to enrolling students, the furthest outside Australia being Singapore, while within Australia the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory was host to kit number 27. Other kits were sent to NSW and Tasmania.
All kits have now been returned in as new condition, although three who had withdrawn from the course very early had to be reminded how to get their $100 deposit back. The latest kit returned was six months late.
The quality of the laboratory reports was, on average, far better than in previous years when students had attended weekend school sessions. Students who struck problems persevered, made contact by phone and had these problems sorted out. Most said they spent about two or more times the usual time they would spend in a lab. It was noticeable that the post laboratory questions, which are a part of each exercise, were answered with a degree of understanding that had often been missing in the weekend school exercises.
A pleasing feature of the whole exercise was the semester retention rate of the students. Of the 40 who collected kits, 31 completed the semester. This was far higher than the usual retention of about 45% for this unit and was a most satisfying result for the effort expended.
The material in each kit cost about $120, packaging another $10 and postage $10. This total of $140 does not count the staff hours spent on development, purchase, testing, packaging, videotaping, editing, and the many hours spent on the telephone, "This is Barry Webster, Unit 1183, from the Tanami Desert. I need some clarification on part 3 of the second exercise."
Overall, we believe the exercise has been a success and we will be using it again when we next offer the unit in 1992. Other staff in the School of Applied Science were also impressed to the extent that we now have seven such units offered in the kit with video format.
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