Provide digital artefacts
This method provides the same visual and/or aural stimuli or simply the raw information that students would have gained from an in-lab practical, by digitising and distributing these data. Examples of this would be to create still images or video of experimental observations or data to represent the readings that would have been collected from instrumentation during the experiment, either stock data from the real equipment or data that is illustrative of the system.
Providing digital artefacts allows students to see the operation of equipment and process data to infer findings.
An advantage of the asynchronous distribution of the content allows students to repeat the process many times to reinforce the learning, and the method is easily scalable to large cohorts, although the production of good quality digital teaching material can be time consuming.
Teaching staff can provide several media clips or datasets to show the variation of outcomes over multiple, ostensibly identical, repetitions of procedure.
A significant drawback to this approach is it limits the opportunity for students to make decisions, such as what data to collect and what equipment to focus upon. It is also difficult to capture the essence of a real time cause and effect response from physical systems.