Developing the Labs for the New Academic Year
Student experience Welcome to Chemistry 17 September 2020
Dukula shares with us some information about how staff and students have been working together to develop the labs for the new academic year 2020/2021.
What I love the most about the Department of Chemistry at Manchester is that they consider student’s opinions to be as important as those made by the academics and staff. In fact, most of the decisions made in the Department of Chemistry are usually evaluated by the students or have had at least some input from the students either directly or indirectly. One such example was the development of labs for the new 2020/2021 academic year.
With the rise of the COVID-19 cases back in March, the university halted all its on-campus activities and went fully online. However, this did not mean the Department of Chemistry wanted to carry out its activities in the same manner for the new academic year. Labs being one of the mandatory components in a chemistry degree meant that something had to be done to give the students the best possible alternative for them to take part in.
In May, our head of teaching labs, Dr Jenny Slaughter, sent out an email asking whether other academics and technical staff would like to help with the task of moving the labs to a safer online environment. But rather than limiting this to only staff members, she also asked undergraduate students to get involved as well.
The labs for next semester are therefore not all based on just the opinions of staff. As the ideas from current undergraduate and prospective students were also collected via surveys and focus groups. The outcome of these results have been used to help develop the online labs.
From May to September, I worked with Dr Lu Shin Wong on creating the online lab for determining the rate of ester hydrolysis using UV/Vis spectroscopy. I was able to not only contribute, but also learn about the theory in more depth and get to know Dr Wong much better as a person. It was a really fun and amazing experience as it helped me to understand very complex excel calculations, gave me a better idea on how to carry out a project and also gave me an insight into future possible work with the experiment as a whole.
So far all staff and students who are involved with the development of online labs have been working really hard and most of the projects are at least 75% finished. Dr Nick Chilton however has already finished building his project on the virtual environment! The lab technical team have also been exceptional and are doing a wonderful job modifying the on-campus labs so they are safe for everyone.
Overall, the labs that the students will be using in the upcoming academic year is solely the work of all staff members and students. We really hope that all students see the benefits and that it helps them with their studies. In my opinion, this is a great example of the commitment to student partnership – treating students as equals and involving them in university related work.
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