We’ve made improvements to help you find and use the resources in our Nuffield practical collection
When there’s a resource on RSC Education that can help you explore a key topic, engage your students and develop their practical skills, we want you to know about it. That means our most relevant resources should always be easy to find and simple to use.
From writing more descriptive titles to making our pages more accessible, we’ve optimised our popular Nuffield collection to help you make the most of these practical resources.
Over 200 practicals
If you’re not familiar with our Nuffield resources, the collection includes a wide range of class experiments and teacher demonstrations exploring key chemical concepts and processes. Each practical includes a step-by-step procedure as well as detailed notes for teachers and technicians.
Easier to find
Whether you’re Googling for teaching resources or simply browsing our website, titles and descriptions provide clues to help you find what you’re looking for online. These short chunks of text tend to be the first things you see on our site and in search results.
By improving the titles and descriptions of resources in our Nuffield practical collection, we’ve made it more likely that they’ll show up when you use related terms in Google or our on-site search. And because relevant and descriptive titles tend to include key topics, reactions or chemicals, it’s now easier for you to see at a glance what different experiments and demonstrations involve.
Rates and rhubarb
What does the title ‘Rates and rhubarb’ tell you about a teaching resource? Is it an experiment? What topics does it address?
As a teacher, you may be able to fill in the gaps. But if we change the title to ‘Rates of reaction of potassium manganate(VII) and oxalic acid’, we give you – and Google – much more information to go on before you even click the link. Those words are important because users often search for them, so we make sure they’re still used to describe the resource.
Easier to use
Our time and patience are short when it comes to reading content online. Whether we’re scanning for key information, or trying to follow the steps in a procedure, the last thing we need is a cluttered and confusing layout making a page harder and slower to read.
We’ve been checking and updating each of the resources in our Nuffield practical collection to improve readability and ensure information is organised effectively, with clear headings and a logical structure.
More accessible
Nobody loves small, grainy images. But images without alt text (alternative text) are worse.
For visually impaired users, alternative text provides a short summary or description of an image, which can be read by screen readers. We’ve added alt text to each image in our Nuffield practical collection to improve the accessibility of our resources.
Wherever possible, we’ve also improved the quality of our images. This is great for users and search engines, but it’s particularly helpful where resources use diagrams to assist in setting up apparatus or communicating what’s going on at a molecular level.
What’s next?
We’re working on making similar improvements to all the pages on our website, making it easier for you to find the resources you need.
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