Traditional teaching methods arguably provide a learning experience at the lowest cognitive level, focus on memorization of factual information that is likely to be of little relevance in the future, and fail to accommodate the diverse learning styles of today’s students. Studies using tradicionaly learning models show that passive lectures lead to the lowest rate of retention among students, especially compared to retention rates when active-learning methods are used. As a result, interest in the implementation of active-learning methods in pharmaceutical education has increased using a variety of techniques with varying levels of risk for the faculty, students, and the course structure. Web-based teaching is one such active-learning technique. One appeal of using Web-based teaching is the potential to individualize instruction, allowing learners to choose their own path to knowledge and to obtain instant feedback on their performance.
What is Virtual Lab?
A web site or software for interactive learning based on simulation of real phenomena. It allows students to explore a topic by comparing and contrasting different scenarios, to pause and restart application for reflection and note taking, to get practical experimentation experience over the Internet A lab facility that is on virtual space, to be accessed through the internet.An experiment is set up in the remote laboratory for users to access through the Internet at any time and any place. Comparing with traditional laboratory, virtual laboratory is particularly useful when some experiment involves equipment that may cause harmful effects to human beings. Another meaning of virtual lab is to implement the laboratory by means of software simulation.
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Virtual Lab tools enable the students to simulate real equipment and experiments. Virtual labs include, for instance, Galaxy Crash simulating collisions of galaxies to make it possible to compare them to students’ predictions that are made in advance for the experiment; LHC Game simulating the whole process of a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider used at CERN; and Splash, the virtual buoyancy laboratory, in which students can learn in a virtual way about Archimedes’ Principle simulating the same experiment as conducted with the remote Aquarium lab described above.