Facing the Didactic Emergency During Covid-19 Pandemic in an Analytical Chemistry Laboratory

Abstract

The active learning environment adopted in an undergraduate course of instrumental analysis was completely rethought and reshaped to accomplish the strict lockdown conditions during the most severe period of pandemic (from march 2020) when all the didactic activities (lessons and laboratory) were fully online and during the less severe condition of the following year, when a blended online learning approach allowed to attend in presence the lab activities but to frequent only online the class didactic activity. The instrumental analysis course has been since several years structured on a problem/project-based learning (PrPBL) cycle, consisting in a part of experimental project accomplished by the students, a subsequent laboratory activity, where the procedures defined by the students are applied to the specific problem to be solved, and a final restitution from each group to the whole class. The pandemic forced us to implement in the learning cycle both asynchronous and synchronous online strategy to keep the PrPBL approach and the active interaction between the students. The extensive use of simulated data and of breakthrough rooms (allowed in Teams® application) was found a highly effective way to reach satisfactory learning results, comparable with, and in some case better than, the ones obtain in conventional teaching mode. In this work we present how the online PrPBL approach was developed and applied to a lab experience concerning a conductimetric titration.