Acquisition and User Behavior in Online Science Laboratories before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the closure of schools at every level, globally, forcing education to move online. Meeting the needs of students online for Science Lab classes, in particular, is a challenge since the physical labs are not available to the teachers or students. OLabs is a virtual Science Lab providing a complete learning environment of theory, experimental procedures, videos, animations, simulations, and assessments that capture real lab experiences with the relevant pedagogy. This study looks at the acquisition and behaviors of users, on the OLabs platform, during pre and COVID-19 times. Using Google Analytics, we observe that, during the pandemic time, users increasingly adopted OLabs as a new learning pedagogy for performing experiments as indicated by parameters like the number of users; the number of unique pages viewed per session; time spent on viewing content; bounce rate; and preference for content types such as theory, simulations, videos, and animations.

Virtual Laboratories- A historical review and bibliometric analysis of the past three decades

“…COVID-19 has sparked the importance of virtual labs substantially in higher education due to sporadic shutdowns, online coverage of technical content, and inaccessibility of physical labs. In this health-induced economic crisis, virtual labs play a crucial role in the experimentation, analysis, and higher education of students in the sciences field (Ray & Srivastava, 2020 ; Raman et al, 2021b ). Initially, before COVID, behavioral analysis on university students indicated the substantial popularity of virtual laboratories in education for skill training and instructor dependency.…”

“…The virtual labs played a crucial role in the higher education sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Google Analytics, Raman et al ( 2021a , 2021b , 2021c ) found that users increasingly adopted online labs during the pandemic as a new learning pedagogy for performing lab experiments as indicated by parameters such as the number of users; the number of unique pages viewed per session; time spent on viewing content and bounce rate.…”

“…In the literature, a wide range of studies like the virtual and remote labs in education (Heradio et al, 2016 ; Tzafestas et al, 2006 ; Balamuralithara & Woods, 2009 ; Grosseck et al, 2019 ; Chandrashekhar et al, 2020 ; Sweileh, 2020 ; Meschede, 2020 ; Ray & Srivastava, 2020 ; Raman et al, 2021b ), Technology-enhanced learning (Shen & J. Ho, 2020 ), e-learning (Jui-long Hung, 2012 ), medical education (Nedungadi & Raman, 2016 ), and Virtual Reality in Higher Education (Shaista et al, 2021 ) have been observed. Virtual labs have been studied as an alternative to in-person labs to determine if students will learn from the virtual lab experience (Davenport et al, 2018 ; Enneking et al, 2019 ; Miller et al, 2018 ).…”

“…In this work, we conduct a systematic literature review of 9523 articles related to virtual laboratories in higher education published between 1991 and 2021. Our methodology consists of bibliometrics and Altmetrics analysis (Raman et al, 2021b ), (Raman et al, 2022 ), and content analysis (Radhamani et al, 2021 ; Tibaná-Herrera et al, 2018 ).…”

Understanding the Bibliometric Patterns of Publications in IEEE Access

“…Similarly, though Australia and the UK have almost similar publications, the citations are significantly higher for Australian publications, nearly 67% more. These numbers show the importance of bibliographic studies in identifying the significance of publications, critical research groups, etc., instead of just assessing the number of publications [74], [75].…”