Raman, R.; Vinuesa, R.; Nedungadi, P. Acquisition and User Behavior in Online Science Laboratories before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Multimodal Technol. Interact.2021, 5, 46.
Raman, R.; Vinuesa, R.; Nedungadi, P. Acquisition and User Behavior in Online Science Laboratories before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Multimodal Technol. Interact. 2021, 5, 46.
Raman, R.; Vinuesa, R.; Nedungadi, P. Acquisition and User Behavior in Online Science Laboratories before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Multimodal Technol. Interact.2021, 5, 46.
Raman, R.; Vinuesa, R.; Nedungadi, P. Acquisition and User Behavior in Online Science Laboratories before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Multimodal Technol. Interact. 2021, 5, 46.
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.
Keywords
online laboratories; virtual laboratories; Covid-19; simulations; science; school
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Algebra and Number Theory
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
