Practical Lab Skills e-Learning programmes show close-up demonstrations of many basic techniques commonly practiced in the chemical laboratory
Academy Savant has released the first three modules of a series of e-Learning programmes entitled Practical Lab Skills.
Besides being useful as a teaching aid in the classroom environment, the publishers state that the series has also been designed as a training tool for industrial, government and medical laboratories.
Each module contains four to six short movies on the title subject, totaling about 30 minutes of video.
The currently available titles are:.
Basic laboratory techniques, comprising assembling apparatus, stirrers, heating and the rotary evaporator.
Distillation techniques, comprising distillation at atmospheric and at reduced pressure; fractional, steam and semi-microdistillation.
Volumetric techniques, comprising balances, pipettes, burettes and making up solutions.
These e-Learning programmes are offered in both web-delivered format and on CD.
Licensing ranges from inexpensive short-term access on individual computers to long-term subscription and permanent licenses for network/intranet installation for learning management systems.
The live-action camerawork is done in a real lab to show the correct and safe method of carrying out a particular laboratory procedure.
The full screen option allows group display, and the voice-over that is displayed as text under the picture can also printed out.
When viewing a programme on-line, the streaming-video is balanced between quality and download time.
In addition to automatically-scored multiple-choice quizzes for assessment, each movie has a section with open-ended questions for pre- or post-test discussion.
There is also an extensive glossary of technical terms.
