Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes in learning methodologies at all educational levels, including higher education. Under these circumstances, one of the most difficult challenges to face is to approach practical and laboratory learning at the university when students’ attendance to the physical laboratory space is restricted. In the particular case of Bachelor’s Degree in Biotechnology, future graduates are appealed to master many instrumental techniques related to this field. Therefore, the lack of onsite laboratory sessions where students observe, practice and experiment with materials and equipment to understand phenomena, either individually or in groups, might imply a detriment of the acquisition of the associated specific and soft skills. In order to minimize this negative impact in learning on COVID-19 pandemic, several initiatives have been carried out in order to adapt learning-teaching methodology from onsite to virtual-laboratory sessions. The aim of this contribution is to share, with other colleagues, the result of this experience in the context of the Fundamentals of Biotechnology Engineering I course at the Universitat Politècncia de València.

For that, the preparation of several supporting tools and resources were addressed. First, lecturers in the lab carried out all the steps of the experiments and recorded them for all the practical tasks in order to prepare short videos (5-6 min screencasts) in which experiments were entirely shown. To these videos, the pertinent related explanations to aims, materials and methods necessary to carry out experiments were incorporated where suitable, so that students had a guidance on how to proceed to get the experimental data of the practical task. Besides, pedagogical articles were prepared including the founding of the methodology and the explanation of the related theoretical concepts, along with the detailed description of the mathematical models and calculations required to achieve the desirable outcomes. Both, screencasts and articles, known in UPV as learning objects, take part of the UPV Online Teaching Plan. In order to assess students’ achievements, they were asked to answer multiple choice/filling the gap questions tests delivered by UPV teaching platform PoliformaT. For that, they had two attempts and then they received feedback to contribute to their learning process. All this information was framed in the “Lessons” section of PoliformaT website of the subject to ease the course-monitoring. Furthermore, during the implementation of each practical task, lecturers and students were synchronically connected by means of Teams platform in the established timetable for each group. Thus, when attending to the lab was possible, lecturers showed in real time the procedure carried out in the lab by the students who physically attended the lab, and therefore, explanation was done in a more detailed way and students were able to ask their doubts directly to the lectures. If there was no possibility to attend the lab due to confinement, the practical tasks were also explained by Teams. In both cases, these meetings in teams were recorded to give the students the chance to visualize them as many times as they needed to understand all the procedure and calculus. Finally, students’ perceptions about this experience was collected by means of a short questionnaire prepared using the Google forms tool.

Keywords:

Remote practical learning, screencast, process engineering, biotechnology, learning objects, students' perception.