Hance H. Hamilton and Jerry D. McMahon Eastfield College Mesquite, Texas 75149
I
An Open Laboratory Approach for the Community College
II
Audio-visual pre-lab presentations
Community Colleges are beset with problems in science education that are in many ways unique among higher educational institutions. One prohlem that presents itself is how to schedule science classes with laboratories when many of the students are employed full-time or part-time outside the college and are able to attend classes and lahoratories only in the morning or only in the afternoon. A majority of students a t Eastfield College fit into this pAttern. Add to this prohlem the usually small faculties and small budgets and it becomes nearly impossihle to schedule conventional lecture-laboratory type courses so that the maximum numher of students can be served. This prohlem has been solved to a degree by the audio-tutorial approach which has been very successful for nonscience major hiology courses where student numbers are relatively large. Audio-tutorial and aoto-tutorial approaches have been tried by many chemistry departments (1-5) but have met with only moderate success since chemistry faculties have been relativelv resistant to -eivine-UD. the traditional lecture presentation, and numbers of stodents in a particular course have been small when cornoared to the laree hiolow classes of most small schools. At ~ a s t f i e l dcollegeUthereare over a thousand students enrolled in a single nonmajors biology course which is successfully taught by the AT method. The comparable chemistrv class enrolls onlv 45. At Eastfield six chemistry courses are taught and five of these are offered each semester. These are a two-semester course in general chemistry for science majors, a two-semester nonmajor course, and a two-semester sophomore organic chemistry course. Both semesters of each course are offered in both Fall and Spring sessions except for the oreanic course. which is offered onlv one time a vear in thedaytime. The total numher of students enrolled is generally no more than 250 of which 170 are dav students and 80 are night students. The total faculty consists of two full-time and two part-time instructors. The part-time instructors have one evening class each. The largest section of a particular course is 84 students. Eastfield College was opened in the fall of 1970 as the second college of the multi-college Dallas County Community College District. For the first three years the traditionwas used durine which time al lecture-laboratorv - approach .. it became obvious that the entire chemistry program was being hampered hv not being- able to serve the workine studen< Laboratory facilities consist of two small lahoratories that were designed to accommodate 32 stodents each hut through architectural error can actually accommodate only 16 without undue crowding. This placed a severe limitation on the size of individual laboratory sections under the traditional approach. There seemed to be no possible way to accommodate optimum numbers of students with the imposed restrictions. In the Spring of 1973 a plan for open lahoratory sessions was formulated. The plan was rather daring in the respect that it would mix all lahoratory sections regardless of course and allow one instructor to oversee students involved in all courses and a t all levels a t the same time. The
