"Are you teaching both online and in-person these days? Biochemistry professors Felicia Vulcu and Caitlin Mullarkey of McMaster University explain how they teach with Labster using any course delivery format. When Felicia has a face-to-face course, she plays Labster simulations right along with her 160 students as a pre-lab exercise. When Caitlin teaches a 600-student online course, her students use Labster at the end of a module as a way of applying concepts they’ve been learning. Felicia and Caitlin both encourage their students to play Labster as many times as they want in order to master the simulations, and they count their students’ highest Labster quiz scores for grading purposes. "
Memorable moments:
[00:09:34] Caitlin: Speaking specifically to virtual lab simulations, we have two main ways that we integrate them into our curriculum. So one is exactly as you said, we do it for marks and the other is really more for play.
[00:11:34] Felicia: They have, I think it's worth very little like five percent of their mark, and they get multiple attempts and they have the highest one. But what I really wanted to do is I wanted it to be more like a gamified intervention type idea.
[00:14:14] Felicia: I want them to have enjoyment out of university and out of their courses so that they get interested in the content, but also help them discover themselves, because that's the purpose of university. It's not just coursework. It's also discovering who you are.
[00:18:39] Felicia: But what we really wanted to do was to teach them a specific fundamental biochemistry concept, whether it be DNA, proteins or metabolism, and then show them how it applies to a biomedical context. So that's what I really loved about Labster, is that it doesn't just show you the, you know, the protocol or the lab or whatever, it wraps it up in a really awesome and relevant biomedical problem.
[00:21:16] Caitlin: Next Generation Sequencing is a pretty high-level technique, but in the Next Generation simulations in Labster, it builds into that technique in a very approachable way, talking about ancient DNA. And I think it really makes some of these, again, abstract and rather complex topics, approachable for students.
Episode 3 Transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13LxxFNb7IL4Ui0etz3g6rwkVjVp3SLJU/view?usp=sharing
Teaching tools mentioned in this episode:
Mentimeter: https://www.mentimeter.com/
Microsoft Teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free
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