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IN THIS ISSUE Left Brain, Right Brain To Protect and To Serve Online Biology Taking to the Streets Chancellor’s Page Development News Factoids NewsMakers |
Armchair Scientists When your kids complain that dinner looks like a science experiment, better double check. If you’re a student in Gin Gee’s online biology class, it just might be. The Miramar College professor’s new, completely online lab is getting quite a lot of attention as the first of the kind in the district and in Southern California. The course, developed by Gee using a California Virtual Campus grant, is intended for nonscience majors to meet degree requirements to earn a fully online transfer studies degree. “The development of the online Principles of Biology laboratory course proved to be much more challenging and time-consuming than the online lecture course,” Gee said. In order to simulate the home laboratory conditions of his online students, Gee initially developed many of the course experiments in the kitchen of his home. However, use of the kitchen as a laboratory created several problems, such as the potential to mix up laboratory appliances with eating utensils, and contaminate cooking materials with laboratory materials. In addition, pouring chemicals such as iodine, alcohol and hydrogen peroxide into the kitchen sink undiluted is harmful to the environment. Soon, Gee moved his home lab to the bathroom, which turned out to be a much better situation. Materials for experiments could be isolated from cooking materials; the bathroom has a ventilation fan, which is helpful when working with chemicals such as ammonia, iodine and acetone; and low concentration solutions of iodine and alcohol can be flushed in the toilet without causing hazardous contamination. A garage with a sink is also a workable home laboratory in Southern California because of the warm weather all year round, but may not be practical in other parts of the country. “The simplicity of materials employed in the experiments makes this hands on and project-based course innovative and accessible,” Gee said. “And yet rigor is maintained in course content.” Taking the online concept even further, the virtual teaching assistant also operates at a distance. He is Shaheen Lakhan, a Harvard University science student who volunteered to help this spring from his Cambridge, Mass., campus. Based
on the experience of the instructors teaching the online biology lab and
the performance of the students and their evaluations, it is evident that
this online lab course is successful and academically feasible, Gee reports. |
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