Distance teaching of experimental scientific methodology and scientific thinking

Objective: The aim of this project was to convert a traditional face-to-face seminar for the teaching of experimental scientific methodology to remote teaching in a timely manner due to the COVID-19 related restrictions to teaching in presence. Methodology: The main focus of the course was on flow cytometry. Basics were developed in a virtual presence phase. Specific teaching contents were taught by an interactive presentation, which came very close to the user experience of a flow cytometer and interactively illustrated the influence of different experimental conditions on the obtained results. Video sequences of authentic sample acquisitions were integrated into Adobe Captivate (R). These "virtual acquisitions" were not distinguishable from the original procedure. For interpretation of the resulting diagrams, interactions were inserted, which allowed direct comparison of the obtained results. Implementation: A presentation with interactive elements and video sequences was created and used for the virtual presence phases. After publishing on a web server in HTML 5, contents were made available to the students for post-processing of learning contents by self-paced learning with full (interactive) functionality. Conclusion: Contributions elaborated by the students during the course demonstrate a learning outcome comparable to that archieved in the last years in presence mode. While implementation of this solution represented a highly time-consuming process, narrative feedback was consistently positive. Due to the short time available for implementation, no systematic evaluation could be conducted, which represents a clear limitation of this work.