Abstract:

In the recent years, a group of professors of the Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry (BDC) of the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) have detected important deficiencies in laboratory skills in a significant number of students. Courses from the second year on are designed assuming that students dominate certain skills to build upon. However, most students do not pass with outstanding marks and carry some kind of deficiencies or shortages to later courses. The problem of laboratory courses is that the real time in the laboratory is too limited to focus on addressing deficiencies of previous years. As a result, some students drag their shortages over the years.

We have created a collection of short videos of the concepts that we considered should be mastered by all BDC students at the moment of graduation. The aim is that these videos will be available as support material to the students in all the laboratory courses to help them solve their deficiencies. A similar idea was successfully applied by some of us to level the skills of students with very different backgrounds accessing the Master’s Degree in Chemical Science and Technology of the UIB [1].

The duration of most videos is approximately 5 minutes. Each video addresses one practical laboratory operation or a theoretical concept, all of which are important for the student’s training as a Chemist. These videos will be hosted in a university’s online repository available to all professors of the BDC. The idea is that each professor can include the videos related to each specific course as study resources. The objective is that the students can visualise the videos to prepare the practical sessions before arriving in the laboratory. They will also be able to watch the videos after the practical sessions to help them study according to their own necessities and time management.

The project consists of 41 videos encompassing all mandatory laboratory courses plus one elective course in the BDC. Additionally, this material can also be useful in theoretical courses that address the skills and concepts included in the videos.

References:
[1] C. Palomino, L. Mariño, R. Casasnovas, E. Palacio, A. Canaleta, G. Turnes, “Knowledge pills for the learning of safety rules and basic laboratory operations in the Master’s Degree in Chemical Science and Technology Subject,” ICERI2020 Proceedings, pp. 1425–1430, 2020.

Keywords:

Chemistry, laboratory, videos, e-learning.