Abstract:

Analytical chemistry laboratory courses included in their curriculum the use of different instruments which are handled by different software packages. Due to instruments availability in the laboratory, instrumental practices often lead to the use of a rotational scheduling structure, which difficults an in situ teacher explanation while the experiment is being done, since each pair of students is using a different instrument at the same time. Therefore, the objective of this work was to record several video tutorials that shows how to use different analytical chemistry instruments and their corresponding software with the aim of allowing independent handling of the instrument by students and faster teaching by docents. Once recorded, the tutorials were published in YouTube to assure a reliable access to all students, and used during face-to-face sessions of the “Food Analysis Laboratory” of the Masters’ Degree in Experimental Techniques in Chemistry at the University of Valencia (Spain). To assess the effectiveness of the tutorials, students’ were asked to complete a postlab satisfaction survey using Socrative tool. Most of the students reported that the online tutorials are valuable and very useful to manage instruments in standalone mode, which help them to feel better prepared to conduct the experiments with a greater degree of confidence.

Keywords:

Online video tutorials, instrument and software handling, standalone handling, satisfaction survey.