Science Made Accessible

“The challenge in developing an online biology course is finding a suitable experience for students to investigate and incorporate into their curriculum,” says Jane Sprangers. “That’s what led me to the lab kits from Carolina!”

“Over the past few years, I have become involved with the Quality Matters™ organization and have developed some online courses under their guidelines,” she comments. “I have been able to get most of those courses certified.” However, she faced a challenge: learning kits from many companies could not be easily customized. “They came as a package deal, and that was that,” she explains. And then she discovered Carolina Distance Learning®. “They let you pick and choose which labs you wish to incorporate into your course. That matters a lot to me.”

Sprangers explains, “If I find that students have issues with one of the labs in the kit, I can request that the kit be modified: I might ask Carolina to improve the directions for better understanding, for example, or I can just delete what isn’t working for the students and add something different. Carolina gives me the flexibility to create a different learning experience for students on that particular topic.” Sprangers is currently using the kits in 3 classes: Human Biology, Anatomy and Physiology 1, and Anatomy and Physiology 2.

“I was looking for a medium-sized organism that students could dissect,” Sprangers recalls. “Cats were too large and rats were too small. Carolina solved my problem by coming up with a modified rabbit dissection kit that has worked well in my class.” Sprangers’ courses involve distance education, “which used to always require a virtual environment,” she says. “I wanted my courses to be actual hands-on experiences in which students are actually doing the work. That is extremely valuable—and Carolina’s kits allow me to do this.”

“We prepare our students for careers. It is important that they be able to read and follow directions. That is especially important to me and the nursing faculty. These kits provide me a way to see if that type of learning is something my students are able to do by the time they get done with my course. That is a huge goal for me, personally.”

“What makes the Carolina kits so useful,” Sprangers observes, “is that the company is great to work with. They put together a very good product that helps teachers to teach and students to learn.”

Carolina Distance Learning® offers Build Your Own Kits for anatomy and physiology, biology, chemistry, environmental science, human biology, microbiology, and physics. To learn more about these kits, visit us online or contact a distance learning specialist.