The Scientific Method - an online course

There is often a disconnect between education in scientific methods and its use in practice. As a result, students find it difficult to apply the methods later on. Wageningen University has developed a modular online course that aims to bridge the gap between learning and application. The development was financed by the Dutch Ministry of Education under theOpen and Online Education incentive scheme and Wageningen University.

The course and all materials therein are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License,


The course at EdX-Edge

A public version of the course is available for every one to view. This course will be regularly updated when we update our own course. Upon updating, any student input will be reset. If you are interested in taking this course, or getting a copy for yourself to work with, please contact us.

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Setup of the course

Various perspectives on the scientific method are tightly integrated in this course: philosophy of science, the methodology of research and the application in a science domain.

Setup of the course

Course structure (xlsx)

Course structure (ods)

Virtual laboratory - CLASS model

To allow students to practice with the scientific method, they use a conceptual model for the atmospheric boundary layer: the CLASS model.

Download Website CLASS

Virtual laboratory - CLASS-notebook

To bring the course completely online, the development of an online version of the CLASS model was envisioned (in the form of a Jupyter notebook). The notebook version has not been used in the course, but a prototype version is publicly available (and under development).

CLASS-notebook info

Github

User manual

The current course is intended to be re-used by others. The user manual covers two aspects of that re-use: use of the material to develop an own course for a different discipline, use of the course to teach.

User manual

Videos in the course

The course contains videos with various functions: to introduce the course and the six modules, to explain the personal science checklist, to introduce concepts related to the atmospheric boundary layer, and to instruct students on the use of the virtual laboratory.

Videos

Re-usable material

The course contains a range of material that could be re-usable in other courses (be it online of otherwise)

Materials

The team

The design and implementation of this course was a team effort. Please meet the team members.

Meet the team!