Transforming an advanced physics lab course

Over the course of this semester, I am taking over the advanced physics lab course at our Institute of Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt. This task comes with certain responsibilities such as holding the introductory session, doing some paperwork and communicating with students as well as the supervisors of the individual experiments, but it also offers me the chance to renew and transform the overall structure of the course as well as selected experiments. 

I believe that the advanced lab course, which is typically taken by B.Sc. students (Bachelor of Science) in their fifth semester as well as M.Sc. (Master of Science) students, is of paramount importance for all future physicists because of the following three reasons: 

• Students get to know our institute: They get the chance to see some of our research laboratories and even carry out experiments that are related to modern research projects in condensed matter physics (e.g., superconductivity, nuclear magnetic resonance, atomic force microscopy, etc.) 
• Especially B.Sc. students are usually just one or two semesters away from working on their thesis project in a research group, which they might not have selected yet. Therefore, the lab course can serve as way to advertise our institute (at least if it is well perceived by the students). 
• Most importantly, students learn essential skills such as scientific writing, technical lab skills, communication and modeling -- skills that can be acquired very effectively in such a lab course as opposed to traditional "chalk talk" lecture.

Due to the importance of the lab course, I am currently thinking about the steps that I, as an instructor, could take to further improve the experience for the students. I would like to share a collection of ideas in the following and I would be glad to receive any kind of constructive feedback and suggestions: 

• Incorporate more computational methods into our lab course, such as data analysis and modeling using Jupyter Notebooks and other related tools. I would need to modify certain experiments to achieve this goal. However, the difficulty is that I need to coordinate this with the respective supervisor of the experiment. Perhaps I could also offer a mini-series of lectures or let students present relevant contents? 
  
• Improve the introductory material for selected experiments (i.e., make some documents more concise and clear). This is not an extremely innovative idea, but definitely needs to be done for some experiments. 
• Create short introductory videos for every experiment. This may be a lot of work, but it would certainly help students to get a better idea prior to carrying out the experiment. 
• Provide more guidance for collaborative work, since students are supposed to work in groups of two to three people. Many students are not aware of tools such as Overleaf, Git, Google Drive, etc. 
• Design and conduct a survey for students to better assess the current state of the lab course and understand their needs and experiences.
  
• Talk to supervisors of the experiments to better assess the state of every setup and understand the expectations and attitudes of supervisors. This is a rather obvious point that I am going to realize for sure.
• Adjust certain experiments such that students do not just have to follow a recipe (do A, then do B, etc.), but instead let them encounter problems that are closer to a real scientist's life. Follow the Active Learning approach, encourage active and critical thinking, and, most importantly, let students make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, correct them and change their strategy in order to successfully conduct an experiment -- just as it is done by researchers all over the world every single day.  
• Set clear learning goals and discuss them (among other important points) early on in the introductory session with the students. Thus far, this introductory meeting has solely been used to present the rules of the lab course, explain safety measures and assign students to the different experimental projects. However, a clear motivation and discussion of learning goals has been lacking, as far as I am concerned. I think that this is one of the most important points mentioned here.
  
• Talk with my colleagues and faculty at our department about modernizing the lab course and other teaching activities. I feel that we do not have any significant discussions on this matter, since many professors are either not very passionate about or do not have much time for physics education contents.

I am aware of the fact that I will not be able to implement all these ideas (especially within the course of one semester; some of them will most likely be never realized?!). However, I think that this list constitutes an excellent starting point for a transformation of this physics lab course.

At the end of this long blog post, I would like to mention that I draw inspiration from excellent resources that are out there. Two excellent papers in this context are provided in the following:

• "The process of transforming an advanced lab course: Goals, curriculum, and assessments", published in the American Journal of Physics, by B. M. Zwickl, N. Finkelstein and H. J. Lewandowski.
• "Transforming a large introductory lab course: impacts on views about experimental physics", published in the Proceedings of the Physics Education Research Conference (PERC), by B. Pollard and H. J. Lewandowski