Practical STEM at the Open University: The Use of Live Video in the OpenStem Labs to Innovate Teaching and Create a Community of Practical STEM Students
Abstract: From a strategy to teach our distance learning students practical skills online, a new platform was developed, ‘The OpenScience Laboratory’ (www.opensciencelab.ac.uk), which sought to ‘bring interactive practical science to students anywhere and anytime the internet is available. The laboratory features investigations based around on-screen instruments and virtual scenarios using real data’. The OpenScience Laboratory project has now evolved into the ‘OpenSTEM Labs’ expanding the teaching to all STEM subjects, through the use of real remote instrumentation, streaming observations of real experiments and live, interactive, online broadcasts from the field and the laboratory. This ‘go live’ delivery allows real experiments and outcomes to be observed, allowing for experimental error or variations as they would encounter in ‘real world’ experimentation situations. We will introduce some of these live activities, the production techniques and how our distance learning students are benefitting and applying their knowledge gained in their modules.
Presider: Yoko Usui, Tohoku Gakuin University