Laboratory courses exert various pressures on students, teaching assistants (TAs), and lab instructors throughout the university term. One of the most pressing is the time that needs to be invested by each group to optimize the collective learning experience. Students are expected to meaningfully engage with activities before, during, and after lab in order to get the most out of instruction and experimental inquiry. TAs are asked to manage a steady cadence of grading work to provide regular, high-quality feedback to their students to enhance learning. Lab coordinators and instructors also must find a balance between pedagogically meaningful experiments, time available at the lab bench, and departmental constraints on TA appointments and expectations. However, lab instructors often have to rely on self-reports and post-hoc measures like assessment scores to identify whether there is an imbalance of time in their courses.

Join us as we unveil Labflow’s newest Time On Task feature. Accurate estimations of time on task may provide a crucial missing piece of data for instructors monitoring and reshaping lab learning environments. In this webinar, we will discuss the ways that the lab management software, Labflow, leverages streams of user data to provide valuable estimates of quantities like student engagement and TA grading time. We will conclude with some prototypes of data visualizations that foreground time on task data for instructors.