Digitalize lab manual into Labbuddy

Project introduction and background information

Last year the PGsO group activity has been changed successfully. The lab class consists of 2 blocks of 4 half days of practical work; a block organized by Food Chemistry (FCH) and the other by Animal Physiology (HAP). The growing student numbers (120% increase over the last 4 years, to ± 165 students this year) requires an adapted set-up of this course. The lab class has to be carried out extremely efficiently. Due to growth in student numbers, this is difficult, as supervisors have to spread their attention over more students and the practical rooms become increasingly crowded. In addition, the data of all individual students are used to provide info on reproducibility (e.g. standard deviations) of the experiments performed, which contributes to the learning process of students. Due to the growing student numbers, this data-combination becomes very laborious. The project tackles these issues by creating online learning material for the lab class.

Objective and expected outcomes

The aim of this project is to tackle the issues above by digitalizing the lab manual into Labbuddy (Food Chemistry E-learning Portal), for the FCH and HAP-lab class, to:

• Provide more structure to students, leading to an optimized learning process
• Keep the lab class running smoothly by the introduction of an active and personalized learning environment
• Reduce the workload of supervisors.
• Provide the theory and lab-protocols in a clear and structured way. This includes open and closed questions, with personalized feedback. Students get quicker and more personalized feedback.
• Achieve an efficiency of 1 supervisor on 15 students.
• Directly collect data of individual students at a ‘Teacher-summary-page’, which enables an easy overview to generate data on reproducibility of the students (used and explained to the students in a lecture).

Results and learnings

• It has achieved an efficiency of 1 supervisor on 15 students.
• Data of individual students are now directly collected at a ‘Teacher-summary-page’, which enables an easy overview to generate data on the reproducibility of the students (used and explained to the students in a lecture).
• Provide a clear and structured lab-manual for easy and fast conversion to a digital environment, 
• Only minor adaptations of Labbuddy for FCH11306.