Engaging Students in Distance Learning of Science With Remote Labs 2.0

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many students lost opportunities to explore science in labs due to school closures. Remote labs provide a possible solution to mitigate this loss. However, most remote labs to date are based on a somehow centralized model in which experts design and conduct certain types of experiments in well-equipped facilities, with a few options of manipulation provided to remote users. In this article, we propose a distributed framework, dubbed remote labs 2.0, that offers the flexibility needed to build an open platform to support educators to create, operate, and share their own remote labs. Similar to the transformation of the Web from 1.0 to 2.0, remote labs 2.0 can greatly enrich experimental science on the Internet by allowing users to choose and contribute their subjects and topics. As a reference implementation, we developed a platform branded as Telelab. In collaboration with a high school chemistry teacher, we conducted remote chemical reaction experiments on the Telelab platform with two online classes. Pre/posttest results showed that these high school students attained significant gains (
t
(26) = 8.76,
p
< 0.00001) in evidence-based reasoning abilities. Student surveys revealed the following three key affordances of Telelab: 1) live experiments; 2) scientific instruments; and 3) social interactions. All 31 respondents were engaged by one or more of these affordances. Students’ behaviors were characterized by analyzing their interaction data logged by the platform. These findings suggest that appropriate applications of remote labs 2.0 in distance education can, to some extent, reproduce critical effects of their local counterparts on promoting science learning.