Laboratory teaching is essential to an undergraduate’s education in chemistry to gain physical skills in the laboratory as well as to use analytical techniques that a student would not normally be able to use outside of the degree course and to fundamentally plan experiments. All of this can be quite daunting to a student about to start their undergraduate course and therefore the introduction of digital media to the 1st year laboratory course will increase confidence in the laboratory and using analytical techniques aiding the transition from laboratory session previously taught in the classroom to undergraduate teaching laboratories. Key aspects of undergraduate teaching are using instrumentation and typically technicians are responsible to show students how to use the equipment however the use of videos showing how to use the instrumentation would take this pressure of the technicians allowing them to oversee the laboratory session. Another vital part of laboratory teaching is pre and post laboratory sessions for the students to plan their experiments and conduct prelab calculations as well as interpret data gathered from the laboratory session, incorporating digital media of how to use equipment, plan the experiment, conduct the calculations and how to interpret the data would overall improve the students experience in the laboratory. The COVID-19 Pandemic was when the widespread use of digital media and video learning was accepted.
This Project aimed to produce and edit new experimental videos from the 2023 laboratory manual using new techniques found from research, inspiration from chemistry-based YouTube channels such as NileRed or periodic videos, and comments of improvements made on the previous videos recorded for the old laboratory manual. The comments of improvements were made by watching the old videos and completing the Nucleophilic Addition reaction to a Carbonyl Group experiment before any recording commenced. The videos were recorded using an iPhone 12 which explained and demonstrated the experiments such as the Caffeine Extraction experiment as well as showed how to set up and use instrumentation that would be used in the laboratory sessions. The videos were edited to make them look cleaner and more professional using iMovie.
Results consisted of producing a 1st draft of the videos and improvements being made to these for the 2nd and final draft of the videos to make these as informative and professional for the students before being uploaded to SharePoint and transcripts generated.
When making an educational video for student laboratory session it is important to ensure that the video is planned out before recording with a script being produced to reference when recording , and to also, run through the experiment before making the video. Whilst recording it is important to remember that the production of a video affects student engagement, the better quality of production the more engagement the video has, to do this it is best to keep the videos short around 5-7 minutes long, splitting the videos into multiple parts if needed and finally recording the clips in smaller segments and editing them together with transitions between the clips and titles at the beginning and the end of the video. Keeping the clips short whilst recording also allows mistakes to me more easily edited out and replaced with a new clip recorded rather than re-recording a whole new video. Finally, editing is key to a better-quality video as it makes the video smoother and more pleasing to watch further improving student engagement.
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