Holding Labs Online

Overview

Teaching labs, inclusive of field courses, undergraduate research, senior design, and other experiential learning courses, remain a significant challenge for online teaching. This document and the linked pages are in place to share resources, contacts, and emerging best practices.

• Please contribute your ideas to the conversation by creating a new topic in the discussion forum.
• Please reach out to Jill Sible (siblej@vt.edu; 540 230-8132 cell) if you would like individual support.

Best Practices for Faculty 

Guidance for Faculty Moving Lab Courses Online

• Reflect on what learning has already occurred and what is the most essential learning left. Prioritize.
• It’s OK to adapt the syllabus. This is your course, and these are extraordinary circumstances that everyone is facing.
• Some learning outcomes may go unmet, especially the attainment of hands-on skills. Be transparent with students about what they are missing and seek opportunities (e.g., boot camps) for students to gain these skills later. What resources and support will the university need to provide to offer these events?
• Go asynchronous if possible. It will likely be impossible for all students to consistently log on remotely in real time for a lab. They will be in different time zones and learning environments. Some may be dealing with illness. An asynchronous lab and as much flexibility as possible with deadlines will give the best chance that students can actually participate and complete the work. If you do hold any synchronous learning activities, be sure to record them and give students an alternative to participate.
• Be inclusive. Not all students will have optimal internet access so consider the size of files, whether or not assessments need to be timed, etc. Also, do not expect students to purchase materials, drive to do field work, etc. 
• Modalities: Virtual labs tend to be most available for lower-division labs. This may be a good choice if the lab coordinator/instructor is already familiar with the tool. For upper-division labs or those just learning about these resources, it may not be worth wading through the sea of materials on this short notice. Video demos where lab instructors/TAs record someone doing the lab that the students would have done may be the easiest approach for most labs. The students can complete all of the other assignments (pre-lab, data analysis, lab reports, etc.) essentially as they normally would have.

More challenging types of labs

Field work: So far, a show-and-tell approach (recording a field experience similar to a lab demo) seems to be the prevailing plan. More creative alternatives would be engaging with large publicly available data sets (e.g from NOAA) or having students measure something locally that contributes to a class-generated big data set.

Built projects: In engineering, architecture and some other fields, students are in the middle of a built project that they cannot return to the lab or studio to complete. Some have suggested mailing projects to students, but this precludes group work and presupposes the students have the necessary supplies and equipment to continue the project. Where possible, in silico work can continue or substitute (e.g. CAD), but this remains a largely unresolved problem.

CURES and UR: In CUREs (course-based undergraduate research experiences) as well as individual undergraduate research (UR) for credit, students are in the middle of a semester-long experiment that now has to be abandoned. For CUREs, lab instructors are considering the demo approach in which they finish the experiments and the students work with the data. For URs in general, VT is planning to host its annual UR conference in a virtual format so that all students have an opportunity to disseminate the research that they have completed so far. See the Office of Undergraduate Research website for updates. Overall, this is not a fully resolved issue.

Links to Resources