This appeared on arXiv on Christmas day. It is a series of lab manual for intro E&M virtual experiment suitable for online courses.
The pdf document itself contains the just the lab instruction. Most of the virtual experiments made use of the applications found in PhET. It is in the abstract that we get a bit of an explanation. The authors claim that:
Student learning outcomes (understand, apply, analyze and evaluate) were studied with detailed lab reports and end of the semester lab-based written exam which confirmed the virtual lab class was as effective as the in-person physical lab class.
Unfortunately, they provided no evidence or data to support this, at least not in the document.
In my lessons, I try to incorporate the "experiment" as part of the lecture itself. So I had students perform one part of the virtual experiment, and then we discuss the outcome before they write down their observations. Then we move on to the next topic or examples before we come back to doing more of the simulation or measurement. So in many cases, the students encounter both the theory and the observation at almost the same time. The exception being when we did Lenz's and Faraday's law, where I actually gave the students the equipment and instruction, and let them discover for themselves the induced current and how the induced current behave with changing magnetic fields. So they observed the phenomenon first before they learned about the theory.
In any case, this set of lab instruction might be useful to be adapted to my remote classes. We'll see how that goes this coming Spring.
Zz.
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