Article Gold Open Access 2022

Alternative Forms of Laboratory Teaching during the Lockdown Period Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic

International Journal of Information and Education Technology
Journal · Vol. 12 · Issue 11 · pp. 1137-1147
Abstract

This article deals with problematics of laboratory learning in the state of total lockdown of educational institutions which was caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Schools in the Czech Republic have been operating in a special regime for more than a year, when most students and pupils cannot directly participate in school teaching, which results in significant changes in the way teaching is organized. There is a significant application of various forms of e-learning and schools use the concept of blended learning, however, practical teaching in laboratories and workshops was particularly hard hit. When replacing student experimental work in laboratories, teaching with the help of virtual laboratories is the strongest. Due to the general irreplaceability of real physical experience of pupils, various combined forms of teaching are used, where only a part of pupils work in the school, so as to minimize the risk of spreading the infection, but these pupils take turns in laboratories. Furthermore, some teachers try to design students' home experiments, in the implementation of which the principles of design-based learning and project-based learning are strongly applied. In this article, substitute teaching of laboratories in subjects such as physics, chemistry or electrical engineering in schools is mapped and evaluated, special emphasis is placed on high schools with curriculum focused towards technics and engineering. It is in these schools that the approach to teaching known as design-based learning is very well applied and the students of some selected schools were able to work on home experiments. It was this form of substitute teaching that proved to be the most effective. © 2022 by the authors.

Keywords

Author Keywords

blended learning STEM education E-learning virtual laboratory Lockdown experimental learning laboratory class

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Department of Technical Subjects, Univerzita Hradec Králové, Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic
Funding & Acknowledgements
Univerzita Hradec Králové, UHK
Grant: 2525
Manuscript received May 12, 2022; revised June 29, 2022. This work was supported in part by the Grant No.18/I 21 directed by Doc. Mgr. et. Mgr. Marie Hubálovská Ph.D. and Ing. Roman Loskot Ph.D. Research was realized by cooperation between Hradec Králové University and eighty technical high schools, twenty-five high schools oriented on general education and eighty grammar schools in whole Czech republic. The main goal of the research was to analyze and describe how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Czech educational system in order to optimize the operation of schools during a pandemic. The main author of this article appears in this project only as a professional and not as a solver. The research also included experimental teaching using virtual teaching laboratories, which was partially implemented using a funds of Grant No.2525, provided by University Hradec Králové, Faculty of Education for Department of Technical Subject, leading researcher Štěpán Major.
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