Ideas portal

I do have a few comments about a month into the LabFlow experience:

• (This in is from me and the TAs responsible for running the labs.) First and foremost: Navigation is annoying and in many cases actively obstructive. I heard that LabFlow was designed assuming mobile devices would be the primary method of access. That’s nice, but many people (like instructors and TAs and a number of students) are using a COMPUTER. Spinning the scroll wheel interminably when I could just grab a scroll bar on a long screen wastes my time. A different issue: if I go into the grade book and begin editing a particular assignment and click the back arrow (in LabFlow), I expect to go back to the gradebook and not all the way back to the main screen. Lots of extra clicks and annoying scrolling. I am pretty sure you don’t want me to be sighing and gritting my teeth while I use your product…

• Significant figures and units in answers are an issue. I know this is hard and detailed, and I know you are working on it.

• Several labs call for students to share data with one another. Again, that is nice and I see the point, but in an all-online setting, it causes problems. There is no direct way for students to interact with one another. TAs or instructors can intervene and collect sone data and then pass it out manually, but what do that when you can do it much better? If you are going to do this, then please put a note into the lab report that the online versions do not require this data. We are OK with adding credit back manually for this missing part of the lab report. OR, when they check that they are completing the lab online have a different report that does not require this. OR when they check that they are online, give them sample student data to use.

• Molar Mass of a Solute Using Freezing Point Depression experiment requires some fancy Excel maneuvers. There are instructions and a figure in the writeup, but we are still getting pinged quite a bit. Make a video demonstrating that.

• I was expecting videos showing actual lab procedures There are not many of these at all. It is an important component that must be added. It is simply necessary in an all-online experience, but will be very useful when we are back on campus as well.

• It would also be nice to have the tables numbered in the lab reports. It becomes cumbersome to try to describe what part we are talking about with students remotely.

Best regards, Andy Holder

Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City

School of Biological and Chemical Sciences

Department of Chemistry | Spencer 109b

holdera@umkc.edu | (816)235-2293 (o)