Back to the Lab
Post-Pandemic Health, Absenteeism, and Technology for Lab Courses
This year a global once-in-a-century pandemic has forced an immediate shift to digital learning strategies. The COVID-19 health crisis forced university administrators to make rapid decisions—often on scant evidence—about how millions of students could continue to receive a quality university education when it would no longer be safe for everyone to return to campus. Traditional lectures proved relatively easy to adapt to online formats, yet universities have found that providing meaningful lab learning experiences a challenge as their institutions have shifted to online-only or a hybrid of online and in-person lab experiences.
Delivering hybrid lab courses has been difficult for both logistic and pedagogical reasons. Lab coordinators have had to divide lab sections into at least 2 groups: one doing online activities while the other conducted experiments in the lab, with the groups taking turns in the lab each week. This required additional work to put together two separate and often very different lab learning experiences each week, deal with the resulting student confusion, and manage the difficult lab report submission and grading process for different types of assignments each week.
As educators turn their attention to returning to in-lab instruction, they are keenly aware that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed our perspectives on health and the spread of disease. Pre-pandemic, students might have attended their lab class feeling a little warm or with a cough, simply because fairly strict policies around missing lab class required students to negotiate a policy exception, a hassle they would rather avoid. In 2020’s disruptive wake, however, this notion of “working through a cold/flu” is unacceptable. University administration and faculty attitudes have shifted towards tolerance and accommodation for students missing lab class due to illness, with absenteeism set to increase reliably over pre-COVID levels.
The need to flexibly deliver both in-lab
and online learning modalities
will not go away after the pandemic
HyFlex and Continuity
With attitudes rapidly changing around how to accommodate student health and the expected rise in absenteeism, novel instructional approaches are necessary for lab courses to remain relevant in university science education. Typically, faculty would schedule make-up labs for absent students or allow them to drop a lab grade, neither of which faculty like to do. However, the lessons learned during the pandemic, combined with innovations in hybrid course design pioneered during the pandemic, can be applied effectively to better handle student absences.
The HyFlex course design model, a form of blended learning that combines face-to-face and online learning with student-centered instructional practice, involves offering a hybrid course (part in-person/part online) with the flexibility for students to choose whether they will be attending class in the lab or online each week.
There are two key challenges to solve with HyFlex lab courses:
Lack of continuity. Offering alternatives to traditional in-lab experiences, such as virtual labs or boxed lab kits typically requires separate and different lab curriculum (experiments) and graded work. This nearly doubles your planning and execution workload.
Cheating. If you choose to simply film lab videos and deliver sample data to students needing to do the lab online, you save yourself the headache of two sets of experiments, but unfortunately encounter rampant cheating for the online graded activities, especially lab reports.
Technology-Facilitated Continuity in HyFlex Courses
Lab-teaching faculty are solving the above challenges using technology. While a tremendous amount of work with a steep learning curve, innovative faculty at institutions such as UC Santa Cruz and the University of Illinois have spent years developing and refining fully or partially automatically-graded lab reports with randomized lab data in homework platforms such as WebAssign and LON-CAPA, and used them successfully to transition to online lab instruction.
At Catalyst Education we have built our Labflow platform to enable any lab instructor to seamlessly handle absences within lab courses using a HyFlex approach:
Pre-lab work, data collected, and lab reports are similar, whether a student chooses to work online or in-person. This assures continuity across hybrid modalities.
Quizzes, homework assignments, and lab reports with simulated data are all randomized by algorithms and content pools to mitigate cheating.
Within lab reports, HyFlex approaches are supported because the data collection, calculations, and post-lab questions reconfigure instantly to support online or in-person choices for entire classes, differing sections or groups, and individual sick students.
Labflow currently provides support, continuity, and HyFlex course delivery to over 100 innovative faculty teaching almost 300 online and hybrid courses. (More information on Labflow.)
Labflow lab report with flexible student choice and randomized simulated data