Actualizing NANSLO, A fully Remote Science Teaching Lab

The North American Network of Science Labs Online (NANSLO) is an international collaboration of institutions in the United States and Canada. We currently have three operational labs: North Island College in Canada, the Colorado Community College System and Great Falls College-Montana State University in the United States. NANSLO uses open source licensing to construct a network of internet controllable, real-time, teaching laboratories to make use and replication as simple as possible. NANSLO’s overall goal is to provide access to challenging inquiry-based laboratory procedures run on high-quality scientific instrumentation to students both outside and inside traditional laboratory environments.

A real-time online teaching laboratories require two components. Those components are the internet mediated interface that allows control of the scientific instrumentation and the procedures that guide the laboratory exercises. The NANSLO project has designed an interface that allows students to control and observe the instrumentation in real-time while still focusing on the science they are learning. Our laboratory interface can be accessed using any computer or tablet platform through the Citrix plug-in. Development of online procedures for student lab activities is ongoing and NANSLO’s procedures can be freely modified by faculty to suit any science course. Presently we offer more than 30 experiments in first year biology, chemistry, and physics courses. In this workshop we will present data showing feedback from students and faculty that have used the NANSLO facility in their course. We will also engage the audience in a discussion of online science education by allowing audience member real-time access to our laboratory equipment for exploration.