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Mehr zum Thema: Ein älterer Artikel über ‘Handschrift vs Tippen‘ habe ich vor nicht ganz vier Jahren hier geteilt.

Implementing Virtual Laboratories in HigherEd

It has been more than three years since I started implementing virtual labs (chemistry and biology labs) at ETH Zürich. I put together the experience so far in a PolyBook (used to be on eSkript: https://eskript.ethz.ch/labster/. Enjoy reading about what has been, and get the feeling of what the future holds! It includes an evaluation and small experimental study.

…and how to get students to collaborate using annotations!

Since fall semester 2015/16 hypothes.is annotation offers the possibility of public, private and goup-private (introduced later) web annotations to the users of eSkript, our platform for Interactive Lecture material.

This is a follow up to last year’s blog post “eSkript & hypothes.is – Web annotation for our students“. There you can read some info on web annotation and the story on how I started to get interested in these usage numbers.

Web annotation is moving fast, not only at hypothes.is, who has added groups to their functionality and a wonderful dashboard, only to mention two of the many new features, but also, in February 2017, web annotation has become a W3C standard, a web standard! Wow!

So what about that new usage data at ETH Zürich?
(Sept 2015 – March 2016 – March 2017)

Compared to the first year, every data point has increased. Since 2015, annotations have been made on 279 separate days on 308 eSkript URLs. (Bewegungs- und Sportbiomechanik has 35 URLs.) 145 users were active and 17 groups have been created. (Roughly 1’000 students have been exposed to lecture material on eSkript so far.) 4505 annotations have been made!

Of these 4505 annotations:

Group annotations have gained momentum and now reach seven percent of all annotations from almost none. There are fewer public annotations (used to be 10%).

Of these 4505 annotations:

Of these 807 text annotations:

The good news here are the 13% of ‘replies’. This is where collaboration begins.

Over time it looks like this:

Replies (in yellow) were mostly given in August, July and in January, just before the exams, by assistants, I guess.

Before coming back to this, let’s now look at the count of annotations per lecture and exercise material:

Spring semester 2017 has barely begun, and unfortunately the lectures Solid State Physics and Chemistry of Materials I & II are not held this academic year. Philosophische Betrachtungen zur Physik II with 84 annotations (on just one URL) has also just started mid February 2017 and is doing very well, especially because only 43 students are registered in this course.

Of the 84 annotations, 11 are highlights and 73 are text annotations. Of these 73 text annotations:

Do you want to know the secret of how to get almost 40% of collaborative annotations? Use a scenario! Have a look at the eSkript scenarios, especially the one on ‘Working with Texts‘ (new PolyBook link).

PD Dr. Norman Sieroka, who pushed the use of hypothes.is and worked on the scenario for the lecture Philosophische Betrachtungen zur Physik II, gave us feedback after their planned use on one of Plato’s text:

Unsere Studierenden haben im Semesterfeedback sehr positiv auf die Verwendung von Eskript [und hypothes.is] reagiert/geantwortet — sowohl als “Disziplinierung” für sich selbst beim Lesen als auch (und vor allem) als Hilfsmittel, um eine Diskussion von Texten vorzubereiten und Themen zu spezifizieren. Und auch wir [die Dozierenden und Assistierenden] sind von der Qualität und Art der Kommentare positiv überrascht.

Translation (Eng): Our students have responded / reacted very positively to the use of eskript [and hypothes.is] in the semesterfeedback – both as a “discipline” for themselves in reading as well as (and above all) as an aid to prepare a discussion of texts and specify topics. And we [the lecturers and assistants] are also positively surprised by the quality and nature of the comments.

Next year, Dr. N. Sieroka and the lecture’s staff want to expand the use of hypothes.is annotation on other texts.

I want to thank everybody involved and especially congratulate the students who made quite an impression and showed how highly skilled they are! Bravo.

Practical Methods in Tissue Engineering (376-1622-00L)

Tissue engineering is the use of a combination of cells, engineering and materials methods, and suitable biochemical and physicochemical factors to improve or replace biological tissues (i.e., bone, cartilage, blood vessels, bladder, skin, muscle, etc.).

At the Institute of Biomechancis at D-HEST, each semester 12 students immerse themselves hands-on into tissue engineering. They learn to use state of the art methods for scaffold production and cell analysis. Dr. Karin Wuertz-Kozak, supported by Prof. Dr. Marcy Zenobi-Wong, teach the laboratory course for 4h per week. Students can earn 5 ECTS, but the didactics allow them to learn much more.

The lecturer’s design of the course’s learning outcomes accentuated four goals:

1. Students are enabled to recognize and compare various 2D and 3D culture systems and choose the most appropriate system for future tissue engineering experiments
2. In the tissue engineering lab, students apply professional standards to work safely and in sterile conditions in a tissue engineering lab
3. Students can apply methods of gene and protein expression analysis, viability detection and mechanical testing to determine the cellular responses and properties of tissue engineered constructs.
4. Finally, students learn and practice how to acquire, critically assess, and evaluate results.

To realize these aims, the lecturers guide the students through experiments in the lab, encourage them to use protocols to independently solve the complex analytical challenges, and even take students on field trips to contextualize their knowledge about tissue engineering with ETH’s academic and industry partners.

Key aspects of the course

• Students perform experiments with state of the art techniques (such as electrospinning, 3D bioprinting and qPCR) that inspire creativity
• Students work on interdisciplinary projects and practice cooperative learning with fellow students that have a different educational background
• Students apply critical thinking by evaluating and discussing their results in the learning controls, by comparing their results to findings in the scientific literature, by explaining differences and by identifying errors/limitations
• Students receive preparation for future (= their master thesis) in all learning controls, but specifically by having to write a project proposal that includes: state of the art, research aims, experimental plan, timetable, budget and relevance (learning control of the lab on electrospinning)
• Students gain extensive hands-on experience that with applicability to current research (small group size, experiments related to ongoing research)
• Students are given the possibility to visit selected laboratories and gain better insights into ongoing research activities
• Students obtain innovative, practical and sustainable safety training by visiting the ETH Safety Parcours and by watching custom-made true/false videos on sterile working environments
• Use of multimedia teaching (all documents are provided electronically on Moodle, including custom-made videos, advance organizer, online entry tests)
• The course has received excellent student evaluations and has thus far been overbooked each semester offered

Advance Organizer of the course:

If you want access to the moodle course, please contact Dr. Karin Wuertz-Kozak.

Evaluation

In the course evaluations, students were extremely positive as can be seen in the picture below. (Overall satisfaction: 4.9 out of 5)

Outstanding work!

(Text by Dr. Erik Jentges, Dr. Karin Wuertz-Kozak and Sarah Frederickx.)

For quite some time, I have been working on eSkript, our web platform for interactive lecture material. One part of the interaction is possible through web annotation of the lecture material right there on eSkript.

In fall semester 2015/16 we launched the hypothes.is annotation that offers the possibility of private web annotations. The year before (2014/15), only public annotation had been possible and the students had given us very clear feedback that if private annotation were not possible, this was not to be used! One of the lectures that started was Bewegungs- und Sportbiomechanik with its lecture material on eSkript https://eskript.ethz.ch/bsb.

Here you can see one nice public annotation including a YouTube video.

There were almost no annotations throughout the semester. The stream of annotations for Bewegungs- und Sportbiomechanik only included seven annotations.

There weren’t many public annotations on any other eSkripts. I was worried. What could the reasons be? Especially, because the year before we had had more than a few hundreds on each eSkript. Reasons could be that eSkript and hypothes.is were not properly introduced to the students, that students were not motivated by the lecturers, that students simply disliked it. Another reason could be that the material was just perfect. The year before, all annotations of students — these indicated typos, errors, problem areas and unclear language — had all been implemented into the material. Was the material crystal clear? Already?

I do not have an answer to that question but being so worried, I wrote to hypothes.is and asked for usage data. Have our students been using private annotations? And this is what I got:

On URLs matching eskript.ethz.ch there are 200 public annotations and 1788 private annotations!

I was flabbergasted. Here is some of the data I got from hypohtes.is. Thank you guys!

Since September 2015 annotations have been made on 130 separate days on 137 eSkript URLs. (Bewegungs- und Sportbiomechanik has 35 URLs.) 72 users were active and six groups exist. (Roughly 400 students have been exposed to lecture material on eSkript since fall last year.) 1988 annotations have been made!

Of these 1988 annotations:

Of the 200 public annotations, I’m certain I have written almost 50 myself but I haven’t written 1778 private annotations. 🙂

Here is the count of annotations per lecture:

In sum these are 1853 annotations by roughly 60 students. The remaining 135 annotations are on the eSkript guides (User’s Guide, Author’s Guide) and other small reports (Computer Exams, Best Practice: Interactive Lecture Material). Biomechanik 2 with 212 annotations started mid February 2016 and is still running.

Last but not least, a very peculiar thing showed itself. hypothes.is gives you the possibilities of annotating publicly and privately but also of simple highlighting (without writing any comment to the highlighted text). These highlights are always private. Of the total of 1988 annotations only three (0.2%) are highlights. Why?

Maybe hypothes.is’ highlights do not work properly. (I don’t think so!) Maybe, if the students take the time to select text and are given a field to write their thoughts of the moment, they take this opportunity. Maybe, there is just space to write something down, space we didn’t have in our physical books 20 years ago.

To be continued… 🙂

UPDATE (April 18, 2017): There is a very simple explanation: The data that I got was wrong about the highlights. I got the new data, and in that period of time of these 1988 annotations 337 were text annotations and 1651 were highlights. As anyone would expect.

Prof. Dr. Marcy Zenobi-Wong and I are currently developing a virtual laboratory with Labster on Tissue Engineering. Have a peek here! Before we tell you all about it in my next blogpost, this is Michael, co-founder of Labster, at TEDxCERN:

Mentioned article: Improving biotech education through gamified laboratory simulations, Nature Biotechnology 32, 694-697 (2014).