Homemade Educational Videos for Learning General Chemistry Experiments: A Pedagogical Alternative for Remote Teaching

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has displayed new challenges for chemistry instructors and students worldwide. An essential part of learning chemistry involves interactions in a laboratory ambiance. However, nowadays, it is necessary to consider alternatives to teaching experimental chemistry in an online environment. As a course project proposal, the students produced homemade videos to investigate a specific topic and find alternative ways to transfer their knowledge through innovative pedagogical and communicational tools. This work was assigned to first-year undergraduate students in a Chemistry I course who could not access an on-campus laboratory. This activity was performed in eight lab sections, considering seven different lab assignments, with 56 homemade educational videos. Each course had an instructor who guided the students and gave their feedback to improve the video quality. The final video output was subjected to an evaluation process consisting of three steps: the instructors’ evaluation, pedagogical analysis, and communicational review. Making educational videos at home could be an excellent alternative to boost the transfer of chemistry knowledge through didactic and audiovisual resources that promote learning within the university, from home, and in remote environments.

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“…The COVID-19 pandemic literally offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for IHLs (Institutes of Higher Learning) to pivot to flipped learning, prompting the chemical education community to experiment with alternative pedagogies to overcome venue restrictions for laboratory work. − At the height of the pandemic in 2020, chemistry lessons in our institute were offered asynchronously via lecture recording, while tutorial and laboratory lessons remained in-person, a practice that has been continued at the wider institutional level currently at the postpandemic stage.…”