Libraries offers a wealth of science education content in JoVE videos

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) Science Education videos logo

Lab access is tricky for both students and instructors right now. Wouldn’t it help if students knew the lab protocols before they went to the lab? Wouldn’t it be great if you could teach a lab online?

The Libraries is pleased to offer online access to extensive video content from the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) Science Education videos. This material is designed to work like a video lab manual, covering the most common lab assignments and protocols that students would be likely to encounter. Students can watch a lab process before going in to do the lab work themselves. Some of the videos also cover major theoretical concepts in ways better suited to visual learners.

Faculty and students now have ongoing access to video content in:

Videos are available through these links, or via Google login through your NC State email. All JoVE Science Education videos can also be embedded directly into Moodle.

“The hope was that if students couldn't safely be in a lab to perform the protocolos themselves, they could at least see the protocols being done, and it would be easier for instructors to point to existing videos rather than having to figure out how to make their own in a pandemic,” says Danica Lewis, Collections & Research Librarian for Life Sciences. “We expanded access through December 2021 in case courses had to remain online, or go online again, as well as to make sure that, even as we returned to face-to-face instruction, students who couldn't safely return to campus, or who might have to go into quarantine during the semester, would still have some form of access.”

The Libraries has offered access to JoVE Video Journal for some time, featuring video guides to new protocols associated with recent research and publications in the areas of Medicine, Neuroscience, Bioengineering, Chemistry, Environment, Immunology and Infection, and Biology. This subscription expansion to Science Education content supports lab courses that have had to move to online or hybrid instruction.

Lewis singles out one video, developed and filmed with Dr. Shreyas Narsipur from NC State’s Department of Aeronautic Engineering, as a good example of what the JoVE Science Education videos have to offer faculty and students. In “Propeller Characterization: Variations in Pitch, Diameter, and Blade Number on Performance,” Dr. Narsipur reviews basic terms and equations important to propellers and propulsion and then conducts a wind tunnel experiment to demonstrate.

“We only have so many wind tunnels at NC State,” Lewis notes, “and so this video makes it easier for students to at least get some sense of the processes involved in propeller characterization when it's not feasible to have them all gathered together in the lab.”