Welcome back to our MOOC, Teaching Science at University. After we got some insights into teaching with simulations from educational expert on simulations, we now have a new guest in our studio here, Caroline Smith. Caroline comes from the University of Westminster, and is a senior lecturer who uses simulations in her classes. Caroline, what did you bring to use simulations in your classes? So the simulations, we became aware of them, and thought that they could be good resources for our students. So the first simulation that we used was one that was to supplement teaching in analytical chemistry, and the real-life running of such techniques would take a very long time, and it's not very exciting for students to see the separation of chemicals. So using the simulation, students were able to alter the conditions of the reactions, so changing the solvents, changing the temperatures, and very quickly get the analytical charts that you would expect for this type of separation. So this was much more exciting for them than listening to me in a lecture theater, trying to explain for an hour how the different analytical techniques work. And after that time, I realized that there was definitely useful, then, within different classes that we had at the University. >> Sounds great. And when, looking back to your first implementation, how has it been? Were you curious or skeptical? And what did you bring to implement it? >> So we've had some positive feedback from students, saying that it's improved their understanding. It's also helped than to see how techniques can be applied to real-life situations, and the students have also reported that that's increased their confidence when they go into the actual laboratory. And I have some quotes that I can show you here. So students said that the virtual simulation gave them good practice before an actual wet lab practical, but they do feel that the wet lab practicals still have a place in their curriculum, to put the concept into practice. Not every student believes this. One reported that they thought the virtual simulation was very time-consuming, and hadn't completely prepared them for real-life lab work. Lots of quotes came back saying that the confidence in the labs had increased with the virtual simulations, and students liked that it was very Interactive, and it helped to consolidate previous knowledge. What a virtual simulation can do that you can't do in an actual laboratory is to mimic a potentially dangerous situation that can emphasize what can happen if you were to carry out the experiments incorrectly. >> Sounds interesting. And if you look to your teaching now, is there some kind of standard procedure, how you implement the simulations, or are you varying over and over again? >> So we found that if we gave the students the simulations to complete, that uptake of the simulations was quite low. We introduced a situation where we had the simulations and we had the whole class carry them out at the same time, but we've actually found that student engagement with the simulations works best where we have a small number of marks that include the simulation as part of a formative assessment. So where we've perhaps only had three or four percent of a summative mark for completing the simulations, uptake by all of the students is very good. And I think it's important to consider your less-engaged students, and approaches that will ensure that all of them have chance to carry out the simulations, rather than just relying on your most engaged learners, which we found to happen if we were to just leave the students to complete them. >> That sounds quite interesting, that even in those gamified situations, at least some formalization needs to be there to really have the best learning experience for the students. But if you now look at your work with the simulations, could you imagine, or would you go back to wet-only lab situations, or do you stick to those simulations? >> So our feedback from the students is that the virtual simulations have helped to prepare them for the practical classes, but they don't want to replace the practical classes with virtual simulations. And in training biological science students, we want them to have skills in the laboratory, and we have similar feedback from staff that the simulations helped to prepare, but not to replace the practical wet lab classes. We do find the students are much more engaged now in the practical wet lab classes, so we wouldn't go want to go back to a time where we had a lecture, and then straight into a wet lab class. because we think that preparation through the virtual simulations is enabling students to get far more from their student experience in the practical classes. >> It's interesting to hear those quotes from students, and from their experiences and their expectations. Do you have some evidence about how students performed with the simulations? >> So I think whenever you introduce a new teaching tool, it's important to evaluate the impact on the students. So one of the ways that we've done this is to have surveys where we've evaluated student thoughts on that particular simulation, and then we've invited back students to have more detailed focus groups, where we can ask much more in-depth questions. And from that, we're able to build up evidence as to whether a new tool has had any impact in teaching or not. >> Caroline, thank you for being here, and thank you for sharing your experiences with us. >> Thank you.