Watching a demonstration where health and safety considerations prevent the class attending in person. Our meetings with educators have found no enthusiasm for this type of laboratory. The general feeling is that large groups of students would not have adequate opportunity to ask questions. They feel that students would be better off watching a video with someone on-hand to answer questions. The production quality would be better and there would be more chance to ask questions.
Videos can also be rewound and played in slow motion.
However, this is used for lectures and tutorials, which are more suited to video conferencing presentation than laboratories. The ability to ask questions in a large group is very limited and even in the presence of a local tutor the students cannot alter the course of the experiment. It is not, therefore, interactive or adaptive. A skilled local tutor can provoke discussion, particularly after the demonstration has finished, that the labs can be considered discursive and reflective. No form of video conferencing offers a picture quality that would be good enough to allow home-based students to take part in a remote lab.