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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 18, Issue 2, Article 17 (Dec., 2017) |
Laboratory is the place where the students can grasp the practical knowledge and experiences (Župerl & Virtič, 2013) to examine a scientific phenomenon (Kurbanoglu & Akin, 2010). By carrying out a laboratory experiment, students can enhance their understanding on the concepts and promote the learning outcomes that have been taught in the classes (Hofstein & Lunetta, 2004; Reid & Shah, 2007).
However, there are several limitations in traditional hands-on laboratory. The first limitation is the time constraint of traditional hands-on laboratory. The insufficient time of the laboratory session (Iskandar, Mahmud, Wahab, Jamil & Basir, 2013) makes the students struggle with the procedures such as unfamiliar laboratory techniques related to the experiments. Some experiments might need a long setup time (Tho & Yeung, 2016). This results in students simply following the procedures word by word. For instance, the students will have a maximum of three hours of a laboratory session for a course in a week (Kelly & Finlayson, 2007). Due to the limited time in the laboratory session, the students would feel that they have to rush in order to complete the experiment. Other than that, some students might need more time to understand or implement the idea than other smarter students (Khattar, Luthon, Larroque & Dornaika, 2016). Thus, the allocated time is insufficient for them to process the data and information obtained from the experiment (Dey, Hell, Rolf, Stankovski & Ågren, 2010).
In traditional hands-on laboratory, students are usually divided into groups to carry out a laboratory experiment together but sometimes, not every student in the groups has contact with the equipment (Zol & Daud, 2014) and conducts the laboratory experiments together with other group members. For instance, some students are afraid to handle the fragile glass apparatus and chemicals. Such problems will lead to experimental errors resulting in slow mechanism, incorrect result and repetition of procedures which consume a lot of time (Nidup & Yodyingyong, 2015).
Apart from that, in traditional hands-on laboratory, students also often rely on laboratory assistants or lecturers to solve their laboratory problems (Nafalski, Nedić, Teng & Gadzhanov, 2016). This leads to a surface approach to students’ learning and not enabling students to operate on a high level of analysis, synthesis and evaluation on the data and information obtained from the experiment (Dey et al., 2010). Besides, resource depletion is also one of the limitations of traditional hands-on laboratory (Tho & Yeung, 2016). Most of the universities are under constant pressure to reduce the expenses of laboratory based education (Župerl & Virtič, 2013). This makes some of the expensive equipment and resources unavailable in some universities and certain experiments cannot be carried out.
As a result of the rapid change and the development of technologies, remote laboratory has been introduced in education. Remote laboratory is a web-based laboratory that allows users to access experimental devices online (Sauter, Uttal, Rapp, Downing & Jona, 2013). It is not a virtual experiment such as simulation but it has a real experimental setup at a distance that enables users to conduct it remotely through the Internet (Ursutiu, Cotfas & Samoila, 2007). Remote laboratory provides remote access for users to conduct the experiments without time and location restrictions (Gomes & Garcia-Zubia, 2007).
Remote laboratories have been used for teaching and learning mostly in science and engineering courses over the last two decades (Cooper & Ferreira, 2009). There are a lot of remote laboratories that have been applied in education especially physics and engineering education (Considine, Teng, Nafalski & Nedić, 2016; Tho, Yeung, Wei, Chan & So, 2016; Velasquez, Ramos & Amaya, 2016). For instance, the PEARL project (Practical Experimentation by Accessible Remote Learning) had developed and provided teaching experiments in some subject areas including foundation level science, manufacturing engineering, electronic engineering and cell biology (Cooper, Donnelly & Ferreira, 2002). However, there is lack of research regarding remote laboratory and the application of remote laboratory in Chemistry education (Tho et al., 2016). Hence, we are interested to evaluate the technological acceptance of remote laboratory in Chemistry education among students, lecturers and laboratory assistants. The question we can probe for this research is, ‘To what extent are they willing to accept the use of technology in carrying out experiments in the remote laboratory? It is important to understand the technological acceptance among them because these groups of people are the users of remote laboratory and the acceptance acts as a key factor associated with the classroom use of technology in the future (Wong, Teo & Russo, 2012).
The purposes of this study are to:
(i) evaluate the technological acceptance of Chemistry students toward the use of remote laboratory.
(ii) study the opinions of Chemistry students, lecturers and laboratory assistants towards the use of remote laboratory.
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