After student reviews deemed her initial use of lecture videos in BIOC 311 successful, Biochemistry and Cell Biology lecturer Beth Beason-Abmayr decided to take her SCAL@R classroom technique one step further by recording demos of lab activities for her freshman laboratory course, BIOC 111. Freshman BIOC 111 catapults new Rice Natural Science majors into the type of learning for which the university is renowned. Beginning with the first class of the semester, Beason-Abmayr challenges her students to take responsibility for their own learning both in and out of the lab.
Beason-Abmayr had found it difficult to attain a high level of dynamic learning from students in their lab work, where detailed lab procedures had to be explained before the students could begin their lab activities. “Before I began flipping my classrooms and labs, I used to spend 45 minutes talking the students through the preparation before a lab,” explained Beason-Abmayr. “And I often had to repeat the instructions several times during lab.”
It was students in her first SCAL@R class with BIOC 311 who proposed lab demo videos. “They offered to do them, borrowed a camera from EdTech, showed me the results and asked me to if they could film me completing the activities.” Now, there are approximately 15 video clips used in Beason-Abmayr’s BIOC 111 lab class, which she created after making 40 other lecture and demo videos for her BIOC 311 course.
Students are encouraged to bring their laptops to the lab in case they want to review different aspects of the videos while setting up their own activities. The lab teaching assistants (TAs) can tell who has not watched the videos and say the students who haven’t prepared adequately “just look lost.” Around these students, their classmates who already know how to run the lab activity are busy setting up and checking details against the video.
Has this innovative technique been as effective as Beason-Abmayr’s lecture videos for BIOC 311? By using the pre-class video clips in the lab environment, Beason-Abmayr has reduced the amount of time students spend in lab by as much as an hour. The lab and lecture videos are successful not only from an efficiency perspective, but she was also excited when her BIOC 111 students would say ‘Oh, I watched the videos and they really helped!’”