Transforming laboratory experiments for digital teaching: remote access laboratories in thermodynamics

Laboratories in an undergraduate physics course were adapted to remote learning while conserving a high degree of student autonomy regarding the experimental work. The commencement of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the resulting restrictions for large groups enforced the immediate development and implementation of new teaching concepts. This article describes laboratories, which have been redesigned in order to give the students the possibility to remotely steer and control the experiments by instructing their teachers, who were on site in the laboratory. This interactive approach allowed for a high degree of autonomy and freedom in the experimental design. The assessment of the laboratories, oral presentations by the students, was carried out in a similar format as in previous years, but remotely. The presentations indicated that the students reached a comparable level of understanding of the underlying physics concepts as in years with on-site laboratories. The experiences gathered with this concept can be beneficial beyond the described one-time implementation and allow adaptation for other scenarios of remote courses.