Best Practice - Interactivity

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BIO 4300 Forensic Science - Dr. Richard Gunasekera

Background Information

• BIO 4300 is a fully online course with some field trips
• Students are scattered to various UHV campuses
• Students have limited access to a biology lab to do the experiments
• Forensic Science is procedural knowledge which must be learned by practicing

Course Highlights

• A virtual crime case was created for the students to study with the following criteria
  • Listening to the crime reporting phone message
  • Checking the crime scene to find the evidence
  • Deciding the correct methods of collecting the evidence
  • Making a hypothesis based on the evidence and the provided autopsy results
• Virtual experiments were designed for the students since they had no access to a physical lab
  • Students followed the instructions to do experiments at home or workplace
  • Students participated in active communication in the virtual environment by using the discussion board and mail in WebCT
  • Course content was organized in weekly learning modules with customized icons that were designed to reflect the topics of each week