Anyone interested in this topic should begin by reading “America’s Lab Report” by the National Research Council. They’ve done a great job of defining science lab experiences and of setting goals for the labs and for their integration into courses.

I’ll begin by saying that typical virtual labs fail miserably to meet these standards. Simulations are not science. Oh yes, scientists do use simulations, but they don’t INVESTIGATE them.

Simulations of science procedures can be used to prepare for doing the real thing, but the simulations are not the topic of the investigation. They might also be used to augment other subject mastery work, but then they’re just another form of drill.

On the other hand, virtual science is done all of the time by scientists. The most public example is the Mars lander program where scientists don’t touch their subject and don’t even see the data until a considerable time after it’s been collected. It’s real science, and it’s virtual!

Lab kits can fill an important niche in teaching science at a distance. If they’re set up correctly and introduced well, they can allow students to perform some experimental design and get good kinesthetic learning experience. You must carefully avoid allowing them to become “verification” exercises or merely procedural efforts.

Verification is a dull and unrewarding task. If students already know what to expect, then they have little incentive to perform the experiments. They can just invent the data.

If all students have to do is follow a procedure, then what are they learning? Not science!

The labs must have some air of mystery about them in order to get the students involved and engaged in their lab work.

However, even if you can make your kit-based labs have all of this, you’re still missing some science. For example, you cannot do a colorimetric determination of copper in alloys at home. Many such examples exist.

If you’d like your students to have a full lab experience in your course and avoid resorting to the fakery of simulations, what alternatives remain?

Consider augmenting your kits with prerecorded real experiments.

A lab will have many such experiments ready to analyze. The results are unknown beforehand; the data are filled with the usual random and systematic errors; the student care and judgment affect the quality of data and even the final conclusions.

Good software will allow students to take their data point by point. It’s even possible to have students do a version of an experiment at home and do the prerecorded ones as well in the same lab. With all data entered into a server, they will be available for students and teachers to review and comment on.

These data and subsequent conclusions may be shared among the class to prompt discussions about both the immediate and less obvious conclusions to be drawn.

The future of online science, and even possibly traditional science, instruction will be a blend of valid science investigation methods.

bld424, good luck with the job application. There is such a wide variety in virtual schools/programs out there, and more starting every year. It is pretty exciting!

mkbnl, you are indeed correct, that teaching laboratory sciences online is a hot topic. I wish I had better remedies for this, but for now, our students receive micro-portions of lab materials and equipment, and conduct the labs on their own. This is an improvement over the old, computer-based virtual labs, but it does lack the collaboration that I feel is necessary for good science. Perhaps web cams and other online tools can fill that niche, or already do for some schools? I would like to hear more about this as well. I look forward to checking out your blog.

jn1211, Thanks! Many people are quite surprised when I describe my job to them. Many are surprised at the high quality that virtual schools can offer, and not relegate them to credit recovery or alternative school programs. Our students, like in any school, vary widely in their academic abilities. Over the years that our school has existed, though, we have developed a reputation for a rigorous curriculum, and students and their families have to be committed to putting in the time to do their work. They know they have a whole network of teachers to support them and provide instruction, but they also have to be willing to ask for help when they need it.

None of the teachers who work at my school had previous virtual-teaching experience, but we all (except one!) have “regular” classroom experience. In fact, that is one of the things that our administration looks for, because we (the teachers) need to know typical pitfalls and misconceptions in the subjects we teach so that we can anticipate the same in the virtual environment. Since we don’t “see” our students and have that body language to rely so much on, we have to be more pro-active in anticipating issues in our fields. Having said that, I think you can certainly still look into a virtual program as a starting teacher! It is its own unique job, and like all jobs, you will learn each year how to do it better and better. I am certainly a much better virtual teacher now than I was when I began, but like all teaching jobs, there is still much more to learn.