Ecolog, A few months ago, I asked about purchasing virtual biology 101 labs on CD- this ended up becoming more of a quest than I expected. I had several people write back to ask about the outcome.
Because I teach a community college Bio 101 section in the state prison system, there is no internet access, and definitely none of the sharp objects, chemicals, or glassware associated with conventional biology labs. While there are many virtual online labs produced by textbook publishers, these are only available online and have not been burned to CD and are not available in any hardcopy format and haven't been in almost a decade. Every publisher I talked to is willing to burn a virtual, internet based lab to disk for you, as long as you place an order of >300 copies or $3,000. This is obviously a deal breaker. Our McGraw Hill / Glencoe rep came through with Biology: The Dynamics of Life, a series of virtual labs on CD, last edition published in (I believe) 2004. McGraw has had some copies collecting dust in some warehouse for some time- it's out of print, and there are only about 130 copies left. In my Ecolog- based efforts to find something suitable, Simbio / Evobeaker came up frequently. Simbio has excellent customer service, comparable prices, can burn anything to disc, and like most other virtual products, have a product line very heavily weighted towards ecology and evolution type labs. This was an issue with all of the other virtual labs I encountered, though slightly less so with the McGraw product I chose. The bias towards ecology and evolution makes sense- it's hard to do a full scale ecology or evolution oriented lab in an introductory class on a weekly schedule, so better to do it virtually, where students can manipulate independent variables over a course of minutes and not months. What that bias means is: there is a giant blank in the marketplace for virtual labs dealing with basic principles like pH, osmosis and diffusion, any labs talking about basic chemistry (hydrophilic vs. hydrophobic, functional groups, carbohydrates vs. lipids vs. protiens), and- this was a surprise to me- please make something talking about really critical biological processes like photosynthesis and respiration. Even though they would be excellent candidates for a virtual lab, photosynthesis and respiration were not represented at all. I chose McGraw's somewhat clunky product because it offered labs on enzyme activity and cell anatomy that I couldn't find elsewhere. In summation, McGraw Hill's Biology: The Dynamics of Life is an inexpensive, dated product with limited quantities remaining, but features more basic science and many of the "virtual dissections" we will use in the second semester compared to many of the alternatives. My response may be biased by asking this listserv, but most materials have a tendency towards more time and math intensive labs that would be more difficult to do in the classroom. Those are my general findings, and I hope some of you will find them helpful! Inigo Howlett [email protected]
