Off-campus but hands-on: Mail out practicals with synchronous online activities during COVID-19

This paper discusses alternatives to on-campus teaching laboratories, to allow for hands-on learning for remote students. Wholly online practical equivalents have become increasingly popular post-COVID (online simulations or processing experimental data only) which can offer lower overheads and easy scale-up, but often miss hands-on learning outcomes. This paper reviews opportunities for mail-out practicals, where the equipment is delivered to students’ homes, combined with live synchronous learning activities via video streaming or online software. The combination of mail-out experimental kits plus synchronous interactive learning activities creates a host of new opportunities for teaching to remote students. Complimentary online teaching activities could include direct interaction with teaching staff or other students, but it can also be real-time simulations of their experiment. The paper presents a specific case study for a 2nd year undergraduate chemical engineering heat exchanger practical, that facilitated hands-on practical learning with synchronous online activities during COVID-19 campus closure. The paper uses a mixed methods approach in a 2 year study to assess student learning outcomes.