Student Engagement - Carolina Distance Learning Forum

📦 Did You Know? We Offer Lab Kit Unboxing Videos!

Leah Bishop — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:48:10 +0000

Getting students off to a successful start begins the moment their lab kit arrives.

To help students verify their materials and feel confident before diving into their coursework, we offer unboxing videos for our Ready-to-Ship lab kits and can also create custom unboxing videos for your Design Your Own lab kits upon request.

Why Use an Unboxing Video?

Unboxing videos provide a simple way for students to:

✅ Confirm they received all required kit components
✅ Become familiar with the contents before beginning lab work
✅ Identify missing or damaged items early
✅ Reduce last-minute stress when a lab assignment is due
✅ Improve overall student readiness and success

Instead of discovering a missing item the night a lab is due, students can review the video immediately after receiving their kit and compare the contents item by item!

Ideas for Instructor Assignments

Looking for ways to encourage students to actually watch the unboxing video? Here are a few easy assignment ideas:

🔍 Kit Verification Checklist Have students watch the unboxing video and complete a checklist confirming that all items are present in their kit.
📸 Kit Inventory Submission Ask students to take a photo of their organized kit contents after comparing them to the unboxing video and submit it for participation credit.
📝 Reflection or Readiness Quiz Create a short quiz asking students to identify key kit components, their purpose, or safety considerations discussed in the video.
🎯 Lab Preparation Activity Require students to locate and label specific items from the unboxing video before beginning their first experiment.
✅ First Week Success Check Include the video as part of a course orientation module and ask students to acknowledge completion before moving on to their first lab.

Need a Custom Unboxing Video?

If you've created a Design Your Own lab kit, our team can work with you to develop a custom unboxing video tailored to the specific materials included in your kit. It's a great way to improve the student experience and help ensure everyone starts the course prepared and confident.

Have questions about available unboxing videos or interested in requesting a custom version? We'd love to help! 📦🎥

Turning "At-Home" Labs into a Virtual Microbiology Conference

Keri Maricle — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:40:16 +0000

Hello fellow educators!

We all know the challenge of distance learning microbiology: ensuring students don’t just "check the boxes" on their Carolina Biological kits, but actually synthesize what they’ve learned. To wrap up each semester in my online microbiology course, I’ve moved away from a standard final and toward a "Virtual Microbiology Conference".

The goal is to take those at-home results and treat them with the same gravity as a professional research project. Here is how it works:

The Activity: The Virtual Microbiology Conference

Instead of a final report, students select their most successful (or most interesting) lab investigation from the semester to present to their peers on a discussion board.

The Professional Requirements:

Conference-Style Slides: Students build a deck covering the full scientific arc: Introduction/Background, Hypotheses, Methods, Results, and Discussion.
The "So What?" Factor: I require a section on Broader Application, specifically asking how the findings relate to their future career fields (nursing, public health, etc.).
Audio Voiceover: To mimic a live talk, students must embed an audio narration, practicing the "soft skills" of scientific communication.
The Peer Review: Using the discussion board, students act as conference attendees by asking questions, providing feedback, and discussing data discrepancies.

Why It Works

It shifts the mindset from student to researcher. By the time they finish, they aren't just saying "bacteria grew on my agar on my agar plate"; they are presenting data in a format they will actually encounter at professional conferences or in their careers. It’s also a great way for them to see the variety of results their classmates got from the same Carolina kits!

Students supporting students (and some friendly competition, too)

Brendan Haynie — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:09:31 +0000

Many students will have some level of trepidation about conducting experiments in the home, so it is necessary to allay those fears from the get-go. One way of doing so is to provide a highlights video of you conducting one of the first experiments so students can see that it isn't "scary" to experiment at home and you can tie this into a forum for students to share experiment "tips" for the other students. Students will be able to engage with other and be a support system for each other.

You can take this idea further (depending on the experiment) with "class challenges". Let's say it is a titration using phenolphthalein; you can challenge students to submit their best titrated solution (fainest pink) and see who had the best endpoint. Make it fun! Make it a friendly contest.

Brendan