Best Practices for Hybrid Labs

Over the last 4 months, I’ve had hundreds of Zoom meetings with faculty and departments from every corner of the country where they discussed their plans for Fall lab instruction. Recently someone pointed out that I might have the broadest perspective of anyone in terms of the types of planning and rationale. So I thought I’d share my conclusions with you.

Many institutions are going fully online, while the remainder plan hybrid instruction to implement social distancing within the labs – typically with half of the students in the lab each week. This is likely because chemistry departments think in terms of weeks and experiments. While this approach seems very rational, it has the downsides of being a scheduling headache, introducing student confusion, doesn’t account for the larger amount of absenteeism we will experience, and still might not provide the space to really safely social distance indoors. 

However, one faculty (and only one!) mentioned a plan that is what I believe to be the most simple, pragmatic, and best aligned with lab course learning goals while keeping student and faculty health as a primary concern: run all the lab experiments online, except each week a very small subset of students come into the lab to perform laboratory techniques. Because the students are not having to run entire experiments, within one or two 3-hour lab periods each student can do most or all of the techniques that they might normally do multiple times in a semester. Think of it as a “technique review” for students preparing for a practical exam, with faculty or TAs there to guide them through 6-9 techniques over a 3-hour session.

An example of this approach: students do a Beer’s Law experiment online (with simulated data and write up a lab report). But over the term they still have to come into the lab once to prove they can take an absorbance measurement on a spectrophotometer. 

What really works with this approach is spreading students out in the lab. Consider the below comparison for what normally be 400 students in 20 sections of 20 students, meeting over 5 different times in 4 lab rooms each week, with 14 weeks of lab instruction in a semester:

Besides better social distancing and reduced time of exposure to other students, this approach has the additional benefit of allowing you to use inexpensive reagents that can be disposed of easily. When doing a vacuum filtration technique, it doesn’t matter that the filtrate is not a product of a particular experiment.