Another article that will affect you as you move into your professional
careers. many of the foreign medical schools use virtual labs for anatomy
and histology so you should keep up with how this may be viewed by licensing
boards!
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October 20, 2006
No Test Tubes? Debate on Virtual Science Classes
By SAM
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/sam_dillon/ind
ex.html?inline=nyt-per> DILLON
When the Internet was just beginning to shake up American education, a
chemistry professor photographed thousands of test tubes holding molecular
solutions and, working with video game designers, created a simulated
laboratory that allowed students to mix chemicals in virtual beakers and
watch the reactions.
In the years since, that virtual chemistry laboratory - as well as other
simulations allowing students to dissect virtual animals or to peer into
tidal pools in search of virtual anemone - has become a widely used science
teaching tool. The virtual chemistry laboratory alone has some 150,000
students seated at computer terminals around the country to try experiments
that would be too costly or dangerous to do at their local high schools.
"Some kids figure out how to blow things up in half an hour," said the
professor, Brian F. Woodfield of Brigham
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/brigham
_young_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Young University.
Now, however, a dispute with potentially far-reaching consequences has
flared over how far the Internet can go in displacing the brick-and-mortar
laboratory.Prompted by skeptical university professors, the College
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/college
_board/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Board, one of the most powerful
organizations in American education, is questioning whether Internet-based
laboratories are an acceptable substitute for the hands-on culturing of gels
and peering through microscopes that have long been essential ingredients of
American laboratory science.
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that
display its Advanced Placement trademark, the board has recruited panels of
university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize
the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.
"Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use
them to supplement their own lab work, but that they'd be concerned about
giving credit to students who have never had any experience in a hands-on
lab," said Trevor Packer, the board's executive director for Advanced
Placement. "You could have students going straight into second-year college
science courses without ever having used a Bunsen burner."
Internet-based educators are seeking to convince the board, and the public,
that their virtual laboratories are educationally sound, pointing out that
their students earn high scores on the A.P. exams. They also say online
laboratories are often the only way advanced science can be taught in
isolated rural schools or impoverished urban ones. Online schooling, which
was all but nonexistent at the elementary and secondary level a decade ago,
is today one of the fastest-growing educational sectors, with some
half-million course enrollments nationwide.
Twenty-five states operate public, Internet-based schools like the Florida
Virtual School, the nation's largest, which has some 40,000 students.
Virtual High School, a nonprofit school based in Maynard, Mass., has 7,600
students from 30 states and many countries. Susan Patrick, a former
Department of Education official who is president of the North American
Council for Online Learning, estimated that 60,000 public school students
were enrolled in some online science course.
John Watson, an education consultant who wrote a report last year
documenting virtual education's growth, said online schools had faced
lawsuits over financing and resistance by local school boards but nothing as
daunting as the College Board.
"This challenge threatens the advance of online education at the national
level in a way that I don't think there are precedents for," Mr. Watson
said.
The board signaled a tough position this year.
"Members of the College Board insist that college-level laboratory science
courses not be labeled 'A.P.' without a physical lab," the board said in a
letter sent to online schools in April. "Online science courses can only be
labeled 'A.P.' if the online provider" can ensure "that students have a
guided, hands-on (not virtual) laboratory experience."
But after an outcry by online schools, the board issued an apology in June,
acknowledging that "there may be new developments" in online learning that
could merit its endorsement.
Mr. Packer of the College Board said in an interview that the board had set
up three five-member panels composed of biology, chemistry and physics
professors and online educators, which are to meet in New York next month to
review the online laboratories offered by Internet-based schools for A.P.
courses.
The board's rulings will determine whether high schools can apply the A.P.
designation to online science courses starting next fall on the transcripts
of students applying to colleges, Mr. Packer said.
In recent conversations with college science professors, the board has
encountered considerable skepticism that virtual laboratories can replace
hands-on experience, he said.
But educators at several prominent online schools pointed to their students'
high scores on A.P. exams.
On the 2005 administration of the A.P. biology exam, for instance, 61
percent of students nationwide earned a qualifying score of three or above
on the A.P.'s five-point system. Yet 71 percent of students who took A.P.
biology online through the Florida Virtual School, and 80 percent of
students who took it from the Virtual High School, earned a three or higher
on that test.
"The proof is in the pudding," said Pam Birtolo, chief learning officer at
the Florida Virtual School.
Still, there is tremendous variety. A 2005 guidebook, "Finding an Online
High School," compiled by Vincent Kiernan, a senior writer at The Chronicle
of Higher Education, lists 113 Internet-based secondary schools, 32 of which
offered at least one A.P. science course. Online curricula are anything but
standardized, and new approaches to online laboratories are emerging at a
dizzying pace, said Kemi Jona, a computer science professor at Northwestern
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/northwe
stern_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> University.
"It's not a one-size-fits-all landscape," Dr. Jona said.
The science courses offered by some online high schools draw on multiple
Internet sites that provide data, then lead students through an analysis. At
one site, for instance, operated by the University
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_arizona/index.html?inline=nyt-org> of Arizona, students collect data
from the cells of an onion root and use it to calculate the duration of each
phase in the cells' division.
Chemistry and other science courses at many Internet-based high schools
include laboratories often characterized as "kitchen science," in which
students use household materials - ice, cooking oil, glass jars - to carry
out experiments.
" 'Make sure we have potatoes in the house,' my daughter told me before her
last lab," in which students studied osmosis, said Mayuri Shah, whose
daughter Sonia is taking A.P. biology from the Florida Virtual School.
Sonia, 16, enrolled in the online course because her high school in Lecanto,
Fla., north of Tampa, does not offer it.
That is one of the most common reasons students sign up for online classes,
said Ms. Patrick, the North American Council for Online Learning president.
"Thousands of schools in rural areas don't have science labs, but they have
kids who want to go to college and need that science inquiry experience,"
she said. "Virtual science labs are their only option."
ConVal High School in Peterborough, N.H., offers more than a dozen science
courses, but zoology is not among them. So Katherine Lantz, a junior, is
studying it online.
One recent evening she was at home, moving through a virtual pig dissection
screen by screen. One image showed a pig kidney, outlined by pulsing yellow
dots.
"Whoa, that's kind of gross!" Katherine said. She clicked her mouse, causing
a virtual scalpel to lay the pig's kidney open, its internal regions
highlighted by blinking labels.
"Its nice to have it enlarged because if we were dissecting this in my
school lab this would be hard to see," Katherine said. "I learn a lot online
- as much as I would attending a physical class."
But Earl W. Fleck, the biology professor who created the virtual pig
dissection, believes otherwise. Dr. Fleck began working on the virtual
dissection in 1997 to help his students at Whitman College in Walla Walla,
Wash., review for tests and to offer a substitute for those who, for ethical
reasons, objected to working with once-living specimens.
Dr. Fleck, who is now provost at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, said
students worldwide found the virtual dissection useful. But he called it
"markedly inferior" to performing a real dissection.
"You don't get the look and the feel and the smell," he said.
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