Distance teaching of experimental scientific methodology and scientific thinking

Objective: The aim of this project was to convert a traditional face-to-face seminar for the teaching of experimental scientific methodology to remote teaching in a timely manner due to the COVID-19 related restrictions to teaching in presence. Methodology: The main focus of the course was on flow cytometry. Basics were developed in a virtual presence phase. Specific teaching contents were taught by an interactive presentation, which came very close to the user experience of a flow cytometer and interactively illustrated the influence of different experimental conditions on the obtained results. Video sequences of authentic sample acquisitions were integrated into Adobe Captivate(®). These “virtual acquisitions” were not distinguishable from the original procedure. For interpretation of the resulting diagrams, interactions were inserted, which allowed direct comparison of the obtained results. Implementation: A presentation with interactive elements and video sequences was created and used for the virtual presence phases. After publishing on a web server in HTML 5, contents were made available to the students for post-processing of learning contents by self-paced learning with full (interactive) functionality. Conclusion: Contributions elaborated by the students during the course demonstrate a learning outcome comparable to that archieved in the last years in presence mode. While implementation of this solution represented a highly time-consuming process, narrative feedback was consistently positive. Due to the short time available for implementation, no systematic evaluation could be conducted, which represents a clear limitation of this work.