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2007 Eur. J. Phys. 28 S29

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IOP PUBLISHING EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
Eur. J. Phys. 28 (2007) S29–S36 doi:10.1088/0143-0807/28/3/S03

Laboratory-based teaching and the

Physics Innovations Centre for
Excellence in Teaching and Learning
Robert Lambourne
piCETL, Faculty of Science, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

E-mail: r.j.lambourne@open.ac.uk

Received 30 October 2006, in final form 7 January 2007

Published 30 April 2007
Online at stacks.iop.org/EJP/28/S29

Abstract
Developments in the laboratory-based teaching of physics and astronomy are
resulting from the collaboration between conventional and distance teaching
universities. The collaboration, piCETL, is one of the Centres for Excellence
in Teaching and Learning established as a result of a broad initiative by the
Higher Education Funding Council for England. The initiative, the piCETL
collaboration and some of its work on laboratory-based teaching are all
described.

Introduction: the CETL initiative and piCETL

In its largest single teaching and learning initiative to date, the Higher Education Funding
Council for England, the body responsible for disbursing government funding to English
universities, has recently established 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
(CETLs). The two main aims of the initiative are to reward excellent teaching practice and to
further invest in that practice so that CETL funding delivers substantial benefits to students,
teachers and institutions [1]. The total funds allocated to the initiative amount to £315 million
(approximately 470 million euros) over the five years from 2005–06 to 2009–10. Each CETL
will receive recurrent funding, ranging from £200 000 to £500 000 per annum over the five
years, and a capital sum, in the range £0.9 million to £2.4 million, which must be spent within
the first 2 years.
Fifty four higher education institutions (HEIs), mainly universities, are leading at least
one CETL and a further 25 institutions (not all of them universities) are involved as partners
in collaborative CETLs. Of the 74 CETLs that have been created, 19 are collaborations
involving two or more partners, while the others all have a single institutional focus. Some
of the CETLs are subject based, such as the Physics Innovations CETL (piCETL); others are
concerned with particular teaching methods, such as the CETL for enquiry-based learning
or the e-learning oriented Reusable Learning Object CETL, yet others are involved in more
0143-0807/07/030029+08$30.00

c 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK S29
S30 R Lambourne

generic activities such as Oxford University’s postgraduate-based Centre for Excellence in

Preparing for Academic Practice. The CETLs are widely distributed in geographical terms
and in academic coverage, but collectively they are expected to have a major impact on the
pedagogical development of higher education in the UK and beyond.
Many of the CETLs may have some impact on the teaching of physics and astronomy,
but four are regarded as particularly strongly oriented towards physical science; the Physics
Innovation CETL (piCETL), Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Effective Learning
in Science (CELS), Bristol University’s Chemical Laboratory Sciences CETL (ChemLabS)
and the Open University’s Centre for Open Learning in Maths, Science, Computing and
Technology (COLMSCT). Of these four, piCETL is the only CETL to be entirely devoted to
physics and astronomy.

The piCETL partnership and its existing laboratory-based teaching

piCETL is a collaborative CETL, led by the Open University in partnership with the University
of Leicester and the University of Reading. The three universities are quite different, though
each has an established record of excellence in physics teaching, and each brings important
areas of expertise to the partnership as well as a desire to benefit from the expertise of others.
Naturally, each is deeply engaged in laboratory-based teaching and undergraduate project
work, but the three institutions have different approaches and face different challenges in these
important areas of educational physics.
The Open University (OU) has its headquarters in the new city of Milton Keynes, about
50 miles north of London, but it is a national institution with regional offices throughout the
UK. Its mission is to make university-level education available to all who can benefit, and its
main method of achieving this is through distance education. It was founded in 1969 and is
now the UK’s largest university. It currently teaches about 200 000 students per year. The
typical student is aged about 30, has a family and a full-time job, and will want to study
part-time.
The OU is unique in the UK in providing opportunities for students studying part-time and
at a distance to obtain degrees in Physical Science irrespective of their previous educational
achievements [2]. This is made possible by the provision of carefully designed teaching
modules that progressively and coherently develop students’ knowledge, understanding, skills
and confidence. The modules are mainly based on purpose-written textbooks, specifically
designed for the distance education of mature students. The books are supported by a range
of multimedia teaching packages, most of which are currently delivered on CD or DVD,
though it is expected that in future materials will be increasingly supplied via the Internet.
Each student is assigned to a tutor, appointed by the local regional office, who supports
the student in a variety of ways. This support includes telephone and e-mail contact, the
provision of some face-to-face tutorials and the marking of the student’s assignments. About
500 students per year take the introductory physics course, and about 400 per year take an
introductory astronomy course that is an alternative starting point for a Physical Sciences
degree. Students aiming to obtain a degree that will be recognized by the Institute of Physics
(the professional body for physicists in the UK) must study a specified package of modules
in applied mathematics and physical science that includes a prescribed amount of laboratory
work.
For OU students, laboratory work mainly takes place in the summer, at week-long
residential schools sited at conventional universities (such as Durham or Sussex) where
the necessary accommodation, catering facilities, teaching laboratories, lecture rooms and
technical support can be hired for the purpose. Experimental equipment is shipped to each site
Laboratory-based teaching and the Physics Innovations Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning S31

from the OU’s national warehousing facility, and teaching staff are recruited from the OU’s
full-time and regionally based part-time staff. Administrative support staff for the residential
school are supplied by the OU’s local regional office, while health and safety inspections will
be conducted by visitors from the national headquarters. Students normally attend any given
residential course for one (intensive) week, but the university will run each course for several
weeks in order to accommodate all of the students (possibly several hundred) who wish to
take a particular course. This aspect of the OU’s operation creates a substantial transfer of
funds from the OU to conventional universities, and helps improve the overall efficiency of
UK higher education by ensuring that costly university facilities do not go unused over the
summer months.
The University of Leicester is a conventional university, with all the in-house facilities that
implies. Its Department of Physics and Astronomy admits between 60 and 90 undergraduates
per year to a range of programmes that allow students to study physics alone, or to combine
that activity with studies in nanotechnology, astrophysics, space science or planetary science.
The students can take a three-year course leading to the BSc degree or a four-year course
leading to an MSc degree. The MSc involves significantly more project work than the BSc,
and is seen as the strongly preferred route for those intending to undertake research in physics.
The Leicester Department is noted for the quality and innovation of its teaching. One
of its members, Derek Raine, is one of the handful of UK physicists to have been awarded a
prestigious National Teaching Fellowship, and is also a winner of the Bragg Medal and prize,
awarded by the UK Institute of Physics in recognition of contributions to physics education.
Dr Raine is particularly well known for his work on the introduction of problem-based learning
(PBL) into the teaching of physics at Leicester.
Problem-based learning has been defined as ’An instructional strategy in which students
confront conceptually ill-structured problems and strive to find meaningful solutions’ [3].
PBL typically involves problem solving, group work and the active seeking out of knowledge
that is new to the student, all in the context of tackling a real-world problem that is used to
motivate the students and drive their learning. The learning activities may involve theoretical
work, practical work or a combination of the two. PBL is already widely used in many
competence-based professional disciplines, such as medicine and business, but it has not
yet been widely adopted by physics teachers. Practitioners of PBL, however, point out that
much of the training postgraduate students receive is actually very similar to problem-based
learning, and many undergraduate projects that involve a significant amount of group work are
also close in spirit to PBL. Indeed, the abbreviation PBL is sometimes deliberately extended
to cover project-based learning as well as problem-based learning, though experts disagree
about the appropriateness of this. The key point is that PBL involves individual students in
finding, evaluating and sharing information so that a meaningful goal can be effectively and
efficiently achieved through collaborative action. Educational research studies concerning the
nature and effectiveness of PBL can be found in [4, 5] and further information about PBL,
especially its implementation in the context of physics teaching, can be found in [6] and the
many other references contained therein.
Despite the progressive introduction, over several years, of PBL into undergraduate
physics courses at Leicester, the undergraduate laboratories were largely unaffected by the
change. This was mainly due to the costs associated with laboratory refurbishment and the
purchase of new equipment. So, at Leicester, as in most other conventional universities,
the students, particularly those in the first and second years, continued to perform rather
traditional experiments that illustrated important points of physics and supported the coherent
development of cognitive and manipulative student skills, but did not build directly on their
PBL experiences. With the advent of piCETL, it became possible to replace these conventional
S32 R Lambourne

laboratories by PBL labs that continue to support progressive, coherent and comprehensive
skills’ development, but do so in the context of the real-world problems that typify the PBL
approach.
The University of Reading is also a conventional university. Its Department of Physics,
housed in the J J Thomson Physical Laboratory, has traditionally attracted about 50 entrants
per year. Between 30 and 40 of these go directly into Part 1 of the three- or four- year
physics degree course (BSc or MSc); the rest embark on a one-year Foundation programme
in physics. Those who successfully complete the Foundation programme may subsequently
transfer to the physics degree. The Foundation programme has been the source of some
of Reading’s best physics graduates in recent years, and has come to be seen as one of the
Department’s many innovative contributions to excellent physics teaching. The Department
was awarded the maximum possible score of 24/24 in the most recent national Teaching
Quality Assessment exercise. Two of its staff are recent Bragg Medallists, and one of those,
Mike Tinker (who sadly died earlier this year), was also the first UK physicist to be awarded
a National Teaching Fellowship. Despite these and many other achievements, the difficult
economic circumstances that confront the majority of physics departments in the UK present
particularly severe challenges to the Reading Department with the consequence that it is
currently scheduled to close in 2010.
A particular strength of the Reading Physics Department is in the laboratory-based
teaching of physics and in the systematic development of student skills. Students start
the laboratory-based part of their course with four 3 h skills sessions that address general
issues such as the safe assembly of apparatus; the observation, sampling and recording of
experimental data; the analysis of experimental results and the steps needed to properly
complete and report an experiment. These initial skills sessions are followed by further
sessions devoted to laboratory electronics and four short experimental projects, each of
3 weeks duration. Pre-laboratory preparation is an important part of the activity, and students
are not allowed into a typical 3 h laboratory session until their preparatory work has been
examined and accepted as adequate by a member of the teaching team. Each student records
the work done in the laboratory in a logbook, and this too is subject to regular examination
and summative marking.
Experimental and project work continues throughout the degree programme at Reading,
and includes Group Projects in the second year that help to develop team-working and
collaboration skills. By the third year, however, there is a significant division between the
work undertaken by those studying the three-year BSc and those taking the four-year MSci.
The BSc students undertake a project that occupies one-third of their final year. Typical
projects might involve the use of the Hall effect to measure carrier densities as a function of
temperature (including the handling of cryogenic fluids), or the measurement of the speed of
sound in a liquid using the diffraction of laser light from standing waves produced in the liquid
by a piezo-electric oscillator. The MSci students, meanwhile, have a third year laboratory
course that emphasizes independent working and the development of professional skills, but
one of its outcomes is a report in the form of a ‘paper’ that is subject to an anonymous review
by other students. This exercise is designed to give the students insight into the operation
of science in the real world, and is another aspect of the professional skills programme that
Reading has developed. In their final year, each MSc student undertakes an individual project
that occupies half of their study time.
Overall, the laboratory-based teaching programme in Reading ensures the strongly
progressive development of experimental skills, alongside the growth of knowledge, skills
and competence in general physics that is to be expected of any physics degree programme.
Even so, there is a feeling amongst the staff in Reading that parts of the programme still rely too
Laboratory-based teaching and the Physics Innovations Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning S33

much on the skills being developed as an adjunct to the laboratory activity and a corresponding
desire to make the development of skills the coherent driving force behind the whole of the
laboratory-based part of the programme. Once again, the advent of piCETL, which is able to
provide funds for new equipment and for new kinds of experiment, is making it possible to plan
and develop this thoroughly skills-based approach. The planned closure makes it absolutely
essential that the excellent practice developed at Reading should be captured in various ways
and made available to the physics teaching community as a whole.

The focus and aims of piCETL

The piCETL partnership is building on existing expertise in multimedia teaching, problem-

based learning and skills-based laboratory teaching, and further developing these approaches
in a synergistic fashion that will eventually benefit a very large number of physics students.
Its interests span the whole of physics education (including the teaching and learning of
astronomy), but its work is particularly focused on the following areas:
(1) curriculum innovation,
(2) the development of personal and professional skills,
(3) the widening of access,
(4) the positioning of physics in a broader scientific context,
(5) the use of modern technology to promote effective teaching and learning.
By its example, piCETL will show how the sharing of resources and expertise can allow
physics departments:
(1) to improve the teaching and learning of students,
(2) to derive maximum benefit from costly laboratory and ICT facilities,
(3) to reach out to new groups of students in novel and exciting ways.
piCETL is achieving these aims by funding a number of individual projects, each with its own
objectives and each led by an academic with an established record of successful teaching.
The first round of capital funding has been used to create offices and e-learning facilities
at the OU, to refurbish laboratories at the University of Leicester and to help equip recently
refurbished laboratories at the University of Reading. The second round of capital funding
that was offered to all CETLs has, in the case of piCETL, provided for the enhancement of
computer laboratory provision at Leicester, a preparation laboratory and photographic facility
at Reading, and for a pool of tutorial equipment at the OU. The creation of these facilities
has been a project in its own right. Their exploitation will provide the basis for several other
projects, some of which will occupy several years.
Another important responsibility of piCETL lies in the dissemination of its findings to
the broader physics teaching community. This dissemination work will become increasingly
important as more of the individual projects reach a conclusion. It will certainly involve the
publication of results in academic journals, but there will also be presentations at seminars,
conferences and educational workshops, along with the provision of a range of materials and
reports on a special piCETL website that is currently being constructed. (A website with
general information about piCETL already exists and can be found at [7].)

piCETL projects and laboratory-based teaching

In keeping with the breadth of its aims, the individual projects funded by piCETL cover a
wide range of teaching innovations. They range from the development of resource banks and
S34 R Lambourne

assessment information systems to work with small groups of students aimed at increasing
the effectiveness of tutorials. Their common features are student impact, the inclusion of
project evaluation activities (or some other kind of physics education research activity) and
the requirement that project outcomes should be disseminated within and beyond the piCETL
partnership.
Several of the projects that were originally funded by piCETL are mainly concerned with
the objectives of just one of the partner institutions. However, in selecting the projects to
be funded, those responsible for the management of piCETL have also had an eye on the
need to ensure that real collaboration between the partners will take place so that the benefits
expected of synergy will be delivered. Three main areas of collaborative working have already
been identified: the common development of resource banks (such as collections of images)
that can support teaching, the electronic assessment of students and, most importantly in the
current context, the development of laboratory skills. What follows is a description of some
of the project work that has been or is being carried out in the context of laboratory-based (and
observatory-based) teaching and learning.
(1) Real-time on-line observing. This project gives students taking an introductory OU
astronomy course the opportunity to acquire data in real-time via an on-line observatory.
The OU observatory telescope, located in Milton Keynes and benefiting from unobstructed
views to the south, has been equipped with cameras and a photometer, and webcams have
been placed in the observatory so that students can watch the telescope being operated. A
programme for training telescope operators has been devised, and on observing evenings
(weather permitting!) one or two operators acquire images and pass them to an academic
activity director who manages their on-line presentation. Contact between the director
and the students is maintained throughout the observing session via a conferencing link
so that new activities may be suggested and discussed, and a running check may be kept
on the adequacy of the information supplied to the students.
The typical number of students taking part in an on-line observing session is about 50.
The skills that they acquire from this activity are expected to be a useful preparation for
a more advanced residential course in observational astronomy that involves ‘hands-on’
observing at the Observatori Astronomic de Mallorca. Investigating the effectiveness of
this link through research based on questionnaires, interviews and student performance
will be an important future project.
(2) Laboratory-based PBL. The work of converting the Leicester laboratories to support
PBL has been carried out in stages, mainly during vacations, so that laboratory-based
teaching could continue during term time. The conversion is now complete and provides
accommodation that will be used throughout the Physics Degree. Part of the space
is also being used to support the Physics and Astronomy Department’s contribution
to Leicester’s innovative i-Science programme, which educates students in a range of
scientific disciplines through interdisciplinary PBL modules designed exclusively for the
i-Science degree. (Further information about i-Science can be found via [8].)
First-year students working in the new study area will find themselves in a ‘studio’
environment, working in groups in areas that have their own computer and equipment
store. The students, working under supervision, will find for themselves the best way
of solving real-world problems and will be able to integrate their practical work with
activity in an adjoining computer area and media suite. Group work will feature strongly
in the first two years, but there will be an increasing emphasis on working in pairs or
individually in the third and fourth years.
The success of PBL in laboratory-based teaching is, of course, crucially dependent
on the availability of appropriate problems. A good problem must be engaging, and must
Laboratory-based teaching and the Physics Innovations Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning S35

cover the desired knowledge and skills, usually in a multi-step fashion. However, it must
also be sufficiently simple to clearly illustrate the fundamental principle, yet sufficiently
complicated that students are forced to come to terms with the approximations needed to
make a real-world problem tractable. Examples of the kinds of problem that are suitable
for laboratory-based treatment can be found in [6]. One of the examples discussed there
is the ‘Othertown airport problem’ which challenges students to build and demonstrate
a crosswind analyser in the form of a beacon that activates when gusts reach a certain
critical speed. The laboratory part of this work involves using electric table fans to
generate appropriate ‘winds’, and can be tackled by building a small turbine that powers
an LED. Once the principle has been demonstrated in a bench-top device, the students
must also consider how such a device could be scaled-up in practice. Other problems
have been assembled from a variety of sources, including from the collective efforts of
groups of academics who have been brought together with the specific aim of enlarging
the range of problems that achieve the necessary teaching goals while also engaging the
students.
(3) The skill-based laboratory. The development of skills-driven laboratory teaching at
the University of Reading is supported by a number of projects. One that is particularly
important in terms of capturing Reading’s existing good practice and fostering the synergy
of the piCETL partnership involves the development of interactive screen experiments
(ISEs). This approach was pioneered and is being developed in Germany (see the
article in this issue on ‘Multimedia representations of experiments in physics’ by Juergen
Kirstein and Volkhard Nordmier), though the particular form being adopted in Reading is
partly the result of a collaboration with Dieter Schumacher (Heinrich Heine University,
Duesseldorf ) and Heike Theyssen (Bremen University).
In a typical ISE an experiment is set up and a very large number of photographs are
taken with the equipment in essentially all possible states. This, of course, implies that
the number of independent variables should not be too great. These pictures are then
assembled on a computer in such a way that students can ‘perform’ the experiment on
a computer in any way and at any speed they choose, within the constraints imposed by
the images available, and provided that no part of the experiment has its own natural
timescale. The effect is somewhat similar to a computer ‘simulation’, but in this case the
images involve real physical events and are not based on any prior assumptions about the
laws of physics, as would be the case in a pure simulation.
ISEs are not a replacement for real laboratories, but they are an important new tool
for physics educators. By allowing students to have some access to sophisticated, perhaps
even dangerous equipment, they allow some of the benefits of laboratory-based teaching to
be gained when laboratories are closed, or even when they are at a distance. They may
also be used in conjunction with conventional experiments to provide contexts against
which those conventional experiments may be viewed. As such, they are of great interest
to all those involved in piCETL.

Conclusion and outlook

The CETL initiative, with its reasonably long timescale and its relatively generous funding,
provides an excellent context for the development of innovative techniques in laboratory-
based teaching. In the particular case of piCETL, the initiative is further strengthened by
the collaboration of conventional universities with established strengths in laboratory-based
teaching and a distance teaching institution with a track record of technological innovation.
Since all those involved have both a duty and a desire to disseminate the outcomes of their
S36 R Lambourne

efforts, there is every reason to hope and to expect that the initiative will ultimately have
beneficial consequences for laboratory-based physics teaching throughout Europe and perhaps
even beyond.

Ackowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the many contributions made to this paper by my piCETL colleagues,
particularly Derek Raine and Sarah Symons at the University of Leicester, John Macdonald
and Paul Hatherly at the University of Reading and Andrew Norton at the Open University.
I also wish to record my indebtedness to the late Mike Tinker.

References
[1] http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/tinits/cetl/
[2] Ross S M and Scanlon E 1995 Open Science: Distance Teaching and Open Learning of Science Subjects (London:
Paul Chapman)
[3] Rhem J 1998 Problem Based Learning: An Introduction NTLF (www.ntlf.com), Vol 8 No 1
[4] Savin-Baden M and Major C H 2004 Foundations of Problem-Based Learning (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press)
[5] Savin-Baden M 2000 Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education: Untold Stories (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press)
[6] Raine D and Symons S 2005 Possibilities: a practice guide to problem-based learning in physics and astronomy
Higher Education Academy, Physical Sciences Centre (www.physsci.heacademy.ac.uk)
[7] http://cetl.open.ac.uk/picetl/
[8] http://www.le.ac.uk/i-science/