Opportunities in Virtual Laboratory Experiments in the Teaching and Learning Process

1. Introduction

The science subjects can be taught properly and effectively with the help of laboratory experiments and hence it is an integral part of the science education (Çepni et al., 1995). The advantages of using laboratory in science education is to assist the students in gaining experience through concrete materials as natural and applied sciences, improving students working habits, problem solving skills, enhancing students abilities to understand practical problems and improving students attitudes towards education (Tamir, 1978). In engineering education, laboratory plays a key role in understanding the theoretical concept and also helps to improve the students communication, observation capability, team work, results analyzing skill, ethics etc. Hence it is necessary to introduce laboratory components in each subject for better understanding of the concepts. The conventional laboratory setup may not able to meet course outcomes (Feisel & Rosa, 2005c). It is necessary to develop innovative design oriented laboratory to motivate the students to engage and spend long time in the laboratory. In the conventional laboratory setup, students follow standard laboratory protocol and perform experiments to meet the pre determined outcome. It helps the students to understand the experimental techniques, collection data, interpretation of data, report writing etc. The level of critical thinking to perform the experiments and deep learning is low in this setup. Few researchers suggest that the innovative approach is needed to integrate knowledge and learning process which helps in solving problems, increasing team and helping in designing new experiments (Julie & Barry, 2010; Yeung et al., 2011). The students’ satisfaction in laboratory is very important parameter. It is suggested that the students’ laboratory experience can be recorded and critically analyzed to provide the solutions because this practice increases the students learning. The students learn necessary laboratory skill sets only if the laboratory has good laboratory facilities and committed laboratory instructors. A number of studies discusses laboratory management and suggest method to increase effective utilization of laboratory resources, quality and safety (Nikolic et al., 2015). The laboratory experiments conducted at school level and college levels are different (Demir et al., 2011; Şahin et al., 2000). The effective time spent by the students in the laboratory greatly affects the students’ learn-ability (Kirschner & Meester, 1988). The engineering laboratory should have well maintained latest equipment, competent staff and faculty members (Edward & Ernst, 1983).