Reducing the Costs of Laboratory Instruction through the Use of On-Line Laboratory Instruction
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Reducing the Costs of Laboratory Instruction through the Use of On-Line Laboratory Instruction David P. Pope and Helen L. Anderson School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19103 Abstract This paper describes a new program for teaching undergraduate laboratories in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania based on the idea that laboratories can be taught more efficiently, less expensively, and better through the use of World Wide Web-based technology. This technology is used to help the students prepare themselves before coming to the laboratory by becoming acquainted with the equipment, going through prelab exercises and taking pre-lab quizzes, both on the content of the work and on the safety considerations of the laboratory, all through web-based exercises. We have shown that by using web-based teaching tools we can both improve the quality of an undergraduate laboratory while, at the same time, reducing costs. We have accomplished this by making a number of changes in the way laboratory courses are offered: 1. We are changing the way students prepare for laboratory periods by putting more information on the web, beginning the laboratories online before class. 2. We have instituted an institution-wide system of on-line grading. 3. We have shown that the costs of laboratory equipment can be dramatically reduced by using of special software on desktop computers to convert the computers into “virtual instruments”. 4. We have estimated the costs of teaching some of our laboratories using the so-called “ingredients method” of cost analysis and have shown that we are accomplishing substantial cost savings, up to 20%, in some cases. Introduction Engineering and science curricula are extremely expensive to teach because they involve many specialized classroom and laboratory courses. Over the past few decades, partially in response to economic pressures, most engineering schools have come to rely more on lectureformat courses with more analysis and theory and less on laboratory-format courses and handson experiences. More recently we at Penn, and faculty at many other engineering schools as well, have begun to re-emphasize laboratory studies, but the costs are still prohibitive. The challenge we face is how to include high quality, hands-on laboratory courses in the curriculum while reducing their costs. Since the largest single cost in any educational institution is labor, decreasing costs means reducing the time it takes to deliver the educational product. We are exploring how to use the new information technologies to make laboratory education less expensive and more effective. The goals of our program are to: (1) increase the efficiency of using expensive laboratory facilities and instructor time; (2) reduce damage to expensive laboratory equipment; (3) increase the time faculty have available for personal
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