{"id":247016,"date":"2018-07-16T11:51:38","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T15:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=247016"},"modified":"2023-11-08T20:47:44","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:47:44","slug":"harvard-collaboration-to-help-students-explore-how-science-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2018\/07\/harvard-collaboration-to-help-students-explore-how-science-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Easing the way for students to \u2018do\u2019 science"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t
\"Robert

Robert Lue says the science learning platform he's helping to develop will allow students and instructors to remix, customize, and share lessons. <\/p>

Jon Chase\/Harvard file photo<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tEasing the way for students to \u2018do\u2019 science\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t
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\n\t\tAlvin Powell\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard\u2019s Lue explains LabXchange, a new virtual community designed to bring concepts to life\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
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Harvard and the Amgen Foundation have announced a new collaboration to create a free, online, science learning platform for high school and college students.<\/p>\n

The effort, called LabXchange<\/a>, will be developed by a group led by Robert Lue, professor of the practice of molecular and cellular biology, and will create not just a series of virtual laboratory experiences for students, but also tools for instructors to create and remix existing instructional content to provide the related scientific background. It will also create a social media-style community around LabXchange, providing a sharing environment where students can look to their peers, as well as instructors, for advice and support.<\/p>\n

LabXchange, funded by a $6.5 million grant from the Amgen Foundation, is expected to launch in about 10 to 12 months.<\/p>\n

Lue, who serves as faculty director of HarvardX, Harvard\u2019s arm of the edX online learning platform, spoke with the Gazette about what the plans and hopes are for LabXchange.<\/p>\n

Q&A<\/h2>\n

Robert Lue<\/h3>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> What problem does LabXchange seek to solve?<\/p>\n

LUE:<\/strong> The majority of students in high school, and indeed in college, have very little opportunity to experience the scientific process directly. For many students, science is a pile of facts. It\u2019s a pile of things that were done in the past that have to be memorized. They don\u2019t have as much of a chance as we\u2019d like to explore the very process of science, where you build a hypothesis, understand a method, and figure out how to apply a method to an appropriate experimental problem. When learning biology, many students either don\u2019t have access to a lab or, if they do have access to a lab, don\u2019t have the schooling or the preparation to take full advantage of it.<\/p>\n

What LabXchange seeks to do is to set up an online learning experience that really exposes them to key aspects of the scientific process, and that gives them a solid background in biology to understand what they\u2019re doing. Then, even if they\u2019re not able to go on into a physical lab, they can have an experience with a virtual experiment that is truly compelling and that gives them a sense of what experimental design and critique is actually all about.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> When I was an undergrad, I had what might be thought of as content courses and then lab courses. My first impression of LabXchange was that this was really focused primarily on providing a lab experience, but it sounds like you\u2019re going to be doing some of the prep for them, so they\u2019ll understand basic principles.<\/p>\n

LUE:<\/strong> I\u2019ve spent decades designing very sophisticated labs for large courses in college, and working with high school teachers trying to do the same thing. And quite often the labs that we design for our students are so focused on the experiment succeeding that they become cookbooks. They\u2019re recipes. It\u2019s like a cooking show. The students come in, they have a detailed recipe, they follow it mechanically, and then something comes out at the end, and that\u2019s it. That is not science. At the other end of the spectrum are independent project labs that provide the experience of scientific inquiry but are very costly and impossible to scale.<\/p>\n

Science is about understanding what has been done before, but then designing the method, choosing the parameters and the conditions, and then trying it yourself. And if it doesn\u2019t work, you need to be able to troubleshoot it.<\/p>\n

The problem with high school labs and college labs is that there\u2019s often not enough time, not enough resources to do that. So LabXchange will provide a very tightly curated set of background materials that get you ready for particular kinds of experiments. Then you can do them virtually. You can do your design, pick your conditions, and run it in a virtual environment and see if it works. And if it doesn\u2019t work, then you can troubleshoot it and try to figure out what you need to alter so that you actually have the iterative experience of experimental design, as opposed to just experimental execution, which is what the majority of labs in both high school and college are about.<\/p>\n\r\n

“Science is about understanding what has been done before, but then designing the method, choosing the parameters and the conditions, and then trying it yourself. And if it doesn\u2019t work, you need to be able to troubleshoot it.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> Where are we now with LabXchange? You just announced a big grant from Amgen Foundation. I imagine there\u2019s a lot of development to do.<\/p>\n

LUE:<\/strong> LabXchange is quite complex. We talked about virtual experiments, and that\u2019s one part of it, and we\u2019re building that from scratch.<\/p>\n

Another part we talked about is the content that preps you in terms of your background and what you need to know. Where that content will come from and how it\u2019s used represents a completely new way to think about the massive open online course content, the MOOC content.<\/p>\n

We know that MOOCs are courses. All of the content, be it videos, be it assessments, the diagrams, the questions asked, all of those things are locked into these big online courses. A critical part of LabXchange is a transformation of the core of the Open edX platform such that content in edX and on the edX platform can be completely unbundled and remixed at the will of, let\u2019s say, a high school teacher or a learner.<\/p>\n

The idea is to create more flexible learning experiences that are more adaptive. Instead of there being one course on biochemistry, you can actually remix components from several courses on biology, biochemistry, and chemistry to get a shorter, more focused thing that you can use. So, the LabXchange platform will enable a high school teacher to custom remix a course, a background short course, for her class, and register only her students in that course. The idea is to create a much more remixable and customizable learning environment.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re completely changing online courses and the core of the Open edX platform. That process has already begun, and the LabXchange platform being built, that remixing aspect known as the Blockstore, has already started, and that task of re-engineering will take basically 10 to 12 months to complete.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> It sounds like, in order for that to work, all the faculty who are creating courses would have to create them in a way that individual pieces of the course are accessible to being extracted and reused.<\/p>\n

LUE:<\/strong> It\u2019s flexible. It can go down to the level of a single lecture video, or even a single problem or quiz assignment. But in terms of the more than 1,500 courses that are on edX now, once the Blockstore architecture is in place \u2014 with the permission, of course, of the instructor and his or her School \u2014 they can all be remixed once the Blockstore is built.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why it\u2019s such a significant re-engineering of the edX core. It\u2019s going to turn Open edX into a next-generation platform unlike anything else. And, because it\u2019s Open edX, it\u2019s completely open-source and free. What that means is when the re-engineering is done, the 35 million learners who use some version of the Open edX platform will, in principle, have access to this.<\/p>\n\r\n

“Instead of there being one course on biochemistry, you can actually remix components from several courses on biology, biochemistry, and chemistry to get a shorter, more focused thing that you can use.” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> So this makes it a resource not just for learners, but also for instructors.<\/p>\n

LUE:<\/strong> Very much so. What this will allow everyone to do is to remix content and to share it to the world and say, \u201cKnow what? I\u2019m trying this combination. It was great for me for this specific purpose; knock yourself out if you\u2019d like to use it.\u201d It\u2019s also a new way of sharing, in the same way that you can share a music or video playlist or something that you love. This will allow you to share something that helped you learn.<\/p>\n

As if there is not already a lot going on, the third piece \u2014 which is entirely new as well \u2014 is basically taking everything we ever learned from social networking, from platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and creating a learning community version of it.<\/p>\n\r\n

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