What's in a name?

I like giving things names. When you create a thing that exists only as a concept, giving it a name makes it more real. The thing can be talked about and as the name begins to be used more often, your imagination replaces the name of the thing with a mental image of the thing itself.

In MEE we have had for a long time a list of all the timetabled teaching activities we deliver. But it wasn’t until we decided to name it the “Directory of Activities” that it started to become widely recognised and talked about. Now, it is a “thing”, and the mere mention of the term strikes fear into the heart of anyone who hates admin.

When face to face teaching was suspended because of Covid-19 there was an immediate scramble by MEE to work out how to deliver practical teaching without students being physically present on the University’s campus. Because practical teaching is all we do, and we had provided over 600 timetabled activities under lockdown conditions, we attracted significant attention by people wanting to know what we did. One of the first things we did before starting discussing our work with educators outside the University of Sheffield was to agree on what we were going to call this new form of teaching. We wanted to give it a name.

There are lots of different terms, such as online labs or virtualized labs or digital labs, used by others and we considered all of these. We settled on the term: Remote Practicals. Why choose practicals and not “labs” for the second part? This is mainly because we don’t just do labs but also fabrication and this border term captures a wider range of our teaching. So what about the first bit, “Remote”? When our students were all on campus, our teaching has always been enhanced with information technology, for example pre lab videos and online tests. In addition, our tactics after the suspension of face to face teaching can include asking students to perform tests at home, either with kit they would be expected to have or with equipment we supplied or controlling equipment in the lab from a remote location. So the idea of creating a term based on the technology to deliver the teaching seemed to not differentiate it and focus on the wrong aspect of what we were trying to achieve when we design labs. The principle difference between our traditional and current teaching is the location of the students. Before Covid-19 they were in the laboratory and afterwards they were somewhere else and so the term “remote” seemed the best fit.

Pinning this term down leads to the obvious next question, what do we call the practicals that aren't taught to a student in a location remote to the campus? Once again, there are lots of terms thrown about, such as face to face practicals, classroom practicals, laboratory practicals, in-person practicals, campus lab practicals. Mentioning the person, or for that matter their face, implies they are removed from the teaching process when we create remote practicals, which is of course not the case. We want the students present, if not in their physical form, when they engage with the teaching material. As the main distinction between the two forms of teaching is the location of the student this had to be captured in the term we define. In the end it was decided in-lab practicals would be the most acceptable antipode to remote practicals.

So there you go. Any thoughts?