Student experience with online Physiology practical laboratory during COVID: What worked? What didn't work?

Abstract

The appearance of SARS‐CoV‐2 at the beginning of 2020 demanded a rapid transition to online‐learning. This posed significant and specific challenges to hands‐on, practical‐based subjects. In this paper, we evaluated the effectiveness of delivering a 2ndyear physiology practical subject in a fully‐online environment. The subject consisted of a weekly 1 hr lecture, and 3 hour Zoom workshop, where the students worked in breakout rooms in small groups of 4‐6. Videos of the practical experiments, together with the experimental recordings and additional data, were deployed through the Learning Management System, Canvas. The student could analysis the recordings using Biopac Student Laboratory and GraphPad Prism which provide autonomy to the students during classes online and offline. The student groups collaborated synchronously, and asynchronously, through the online electronic notebook, LabArchives. To promote further collaborative work across the whole class, we utilised an online discussion board (Edstem.org), and Padlet for co‐operation between students. The integration of this suite of online tools and offline software provided students with autonomy while facilitating and promoting teamwork in the online learning environment.At the end of the semester, students were surveyed on their perception of different aspects of the subject using Qualtrics on a 5 point‐Likert scale. The completion of the survey was voluntary. Responses ranked either Agree or Strongly Agree were grouped as positive responses.From the 40 responses received, the impact of transition to online practical classes was clearly mixed for students with an even distribution across responses. While 35% of respondents found it difficult to adjust to online learning, and only 45% of the students found online practicals classes in Zoom breakout rooms to be an engaging learning space, 60% still enjoyed the weekly practical classes. This difference is likely due to the positive effect of working with the same group throughout the semester (85% positive responses) and the majority of students (97%) found their team to be cohesive throughout the semester. The breakout rooms were also viewed as an important part of the subject, with the inclusion of webcam videos in the breakout rooms to be important for team cohesion (93% positive responses).Majority of students found the videos of the experiments useful and important to understand the procedures (90%), and most felt that the videos were essential for the online practicals (71%). Nearly all the students (94%) reported to have watched the videos, and interestingly, 60 preferred to watch the videos with their teams in the breakout rooms during the Zoom sessions. Despite some challenges with LabArchives, 62% of students found LabArchives to be an effective collaboration tool for online practical classes. In addition, 65% of students reported that they regularly used the online discussion board to aid their learning, and more than half (55%) prefer a subject wide discussion board, than private forums.In conclusion, the experience of online practical learning is challenging to some students. The results of this study indicate factors such as instructional videos, working with the same team and online collaborative tools can improve the student experience for online practical learning.