Foreword by David F. Treagust
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Published:12 Jul 2023
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Special Collection: 2023 ebook collection
Digital Learning and Teaching in Chemistry, ed. Y. Dori, C. Ngai, and G. Szteinberg, The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2023, pp. P009-P012.
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This book is well-placed to address the important issues of digital teaching and learning in chemistry that have been exacerbated by the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, even before the pandemic arrived, with the universal availability of high-speed internet, digital teaching and learning became more available as an option and a part of school and university course offerings. With the onset of the pandemic, digital teaching and learning became a necessity for education; teachers, lecturers and their students needed to rapidly adapt to a new style of teaching, learning and assessment online. These three aspects of education in chemistry are addressed in this book and demonstrate that teaching face-to-face and online have different dynamics that need to be learned and understood for their respective effectiveness. I discuss more on this point later from our own research.
In March 2019, before any concerns about Covid-19, The American Enterprise Institute1 published ‘The promises and limits of online higher education’, based on a national survey of US college administrators, recognising the steady increase of higher education offerings of online course over the past two decades. While this review did not include science courses but focused on business, computing and statistics courses, some important points were that comparative learning improvements were made by students in single one-off online courses but for four-year relatively selective institutions, many studies identified negative effects of online instruction on course grade—in some cases much worse. There are messages here about the need for hybrid models of learning as demonstrated by several authors of this book.
Among the recommendations to enhance online learning and instruction that arise from this survey are that promoting interpersonal interactions is a key to successful learning by assigning students to peer groups, small group problem activities, and synchronous online discussions that are also advantageous for face-to-face classes. Later, I report similar findings from our own chemistry education research. An important consideration is the need to identify potential at-risk students online in a timely manner, which is likely to be more difficult than in face-to-face situations. Online students also need high levels of self-regulation and self-discipline, and this tends to favour adult learners. Another concern of online-only learning is the need to improve communication skills and making sense of concepts and communication through a different medium. Each of these issues most certainly apply to chemistry and have been noted by the authors in this book.
Returning to digital learning and teaching in chemistry—the focus of this book—the single biggest potential loss of online chemistry courses is the lack, or change in emphasis, of laboratory work. Fortunately, researchers2 are addressing this issue by the creation of online resources such as Labster3 and Lab Sims4 that provide virtual laboratories across science for high school and university as well as laboratory techniques through JoVE,5 a peer-reviewed and PubMed indexed video journal that publishes high quality demonstrations of methodology where students are presented with data and do the analysis. Using these JoVE videos, researchers6 report investigations with university general chemistry students that show significant learning outcomes and reinforced conceptual understanding for important foundational concepts such as enthalpy, entropy, rate laws and Le Chatelier’s principle. Likewise, it is possible for students to do practical science at home using online resources that are readily made available, as illustrated with first year undergraduates.7 The chapters in this book address these issues.
Before the pandemic, with colleagues in chemistry and engineering at Curtin University, I recently completed an Australian Research Council (ARC) project to investigate the essential elements of laboratory-based learning for remote-access implementation of online science and engineering courses.8 Working with first year university students in chemistry and engineering, our findings were that remote laboratories generated a feeling of undertaking a real experiment through a live video feed of the equipment. However, students reported that interactions with their peers were less important than in face-to-face laboratories. Similarly, students recognised the value of remote laboratories but noted that internet-mediated interactions could inhibit their acquisition of expected learning outcomes related to instrumentation, communication, experimentation, ethics, safety matters, and learning from failures.
Our research outcomes showed that students—under normal operation of universities—value remote-laboratory activities, not as a replacement for face-to-face laboratories but as a complement to the latter, traditional mode.9 Our research has provided a much clearer understanding of the importance of instructor–student interactions and student–student interactions as well as interactions with the laboratory equipment in university science and engineering remote laboratories. For remote laboratories to be sustainably available in the future, we recommended that they need to be made more engaging and laboratory instructors should provide more autonomy for students learning in both remote and face-to-face laboratories. This ARC research project has provided both insights and tools to enable this to occur.
This book brings different approaches and emphases to chemistry learning, teaching, and evaluation, both at higher education and school level. A solid research foundation runs along with the book’s practical perspective, making it a valuable resource for educators and researchers in chemistry education, as well as those in other STEM fields, as the digitization of education systems continues to advance.
David F. Treagust,
Professor of Science Education, School of Education
Curtin University, Perth, Australia