The Western Conference on Science Education

Use of videos to demonstrate and teach techniques and concepts

PAB 148

The advent of digital media provides many affordances for educational use. We employed the use of video to highlight important laboratory practices (i.e. sterile technique), as well as laboratory skills (e.g. cell culture). Educational technology literature is abundant on the benefits of using videos to illustrate skills and procedures. This use has not been widespread as a pedagogical tool for pre-lab lectures in science courses. Our videos were created with the following objectives in mind: (i) To provide students with an intimate illustration of skills and procedures that could be viewed before coming to laboratory sessions; (ii) To provide students with a reference to use while working in the lab; and (iii) To provide students with a resource for known problem areas to be used on-demand, and as often as required. We further developed videos as training tutorials on post-lab skills such as statistical analysis procedures.