Ana Tomljenovic-Berube

Course

LIFESCI 2L03 | Living Systems Laboratory | 550 students

Their story

I teach an introductory second-year laboratory course in the Life Sciences program. When the University closed its doors in March 2020, we knew that there was a strong possibility we would have to offer our course virtually, which was a huge challenge considering our students usually have weekly in-person labs.

We had been searching for a platform to digitize our lab manual when I was introduced to Pressbook through a presentation by Catherine Anderson in Linguistics. I realized it might be a great platform to offer an interactive virtual lab manual using the integrated H5P features. With a fellow colleague, two instructional assistants, several students, and lots of brainstorming, we transformed our course to allow students to explore laboratory and data literacy concepts in Life Sciences independently in the home environment.

We surveyed students at mid-term and they felt the course was laid out very clearly and that the interactive tools were helpful in navigating experiments. They also gave us great feedback on ways to improve. Our Pressbook manual is a one-stop shopping guide and includes interactive images, interactive videos, GIFs, and more, and it is certainly a tool that we plan to use to help students learn even when we get back to in-person learning.

While we had always planned to move in this direction, the switch to virtual learning forced us to innovate, and I know it will benefit students moving forward.

Please direct your inquiries to: tomljeam@mcmaster.ca