UCSD Extension Feature Story

Kritin Karkare

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States, colleges and universities shuttered their doors without hesitation. Students were forced out of the dorms, going back home to continue their secondary education online with no end in sight. For some students, the change to online curricula changed little about how they learned. Yet for others – such as biology and chemistry majors that depend on lab classes for hands-on experience – it raised many questions about how they get practical experience while in online college.

Let’s learn about some of the ways lab professors have adjusted to this perplexing puzzle.

At UC San Diego

At the University of California, San Diego, students and teachers were left bewildered as they were forced into online learning. One such teacher was Katherine Petrie, an assistant teaching professor in the Division of Biological Sciences. Among the classes she teaches, some are focused on bioinformatics – the study of applying computer programming to biological data – and another class is BIMM 121, known as Microbiology Lab, that focuses on microbiology in industry, the home, and the environment. Switching a bioinformatics class that already deals with computer science to be online is easy, but fully converting a microbiology lab course where students have to do hands on work with microbes, test tubes, and yogurt? Just a little bit of a challenge.

“That was kind of crazy. I was teaching two other courses at the time, one of which was a brand-new bioinformatics class.” Petrie said. “That lab was pretty well suited for being taught online but figuring out how to get the microbiology lab online quickly was hard.”

Because wet lab work involves skills like pipetting liquids and swabbing nutrient plates with bacteria, it is easy to understand how students miss out on experience that they need for work in research labs and industry.

Without only a few weeks in between the end of winter quarter and the start of spring quarter, the microbiology instructors came up with a starting game plan. They started by going through the weeks of the regular microbiology lab course and filling them with activities such as lab simulations, videos on proper lab techniques, and several modules involving microbe community data analysis. Other colleges have employed similar ideas of teaching when it comes to substituting the hands-on work. At the University of New Hampshire, one of the coastal ecology class professors streamed field trips and dissections to students. A organism biology class at Roosevelt University had students use their thinking skills to identify organisms from videos and pictures.

Bringing the Science Home

With the pandemic lasting around six months so far and cases in the United States numbering at more than 6 million at the end of August, the pandemic looks like it will be far from over. As such, instructors must potentially look to not just fall but also winter as being online only.

For Petrie and other professors that teach biology lab classes at UC San Diego, one plan of attack is to bring the science directly to the students at their home. They plan to assemble lab kits that would contain supplies for collecting samples that students could then mail back to campus. Instructional lab staff would then do experiments on the data and send then the data afterwards to the students to analyze.

In the case of BIMM 121, Petrie is interested in asking students to swab down surfaces of their home like kitchen counters and dining room floors to collect information on microbial communities. With the aid of DNA sequencing, data on all the different kinds of bacteria that live around homes can be found. This could potentially answer fun questions like: “What is the difference between a home with cats vs a home with dogs?”

As one might imagine, sending these materials to students is a logistical challenge. How much would shipping cost? What students can receive the kits? Would the samples that students send back get damaged along the way? Time will tell if the kits will be an effective way of keeping students engaged in the scientific process.

A Balancing Act

In addition to the kits, Petrie has other ideas for activities, planning to focus on ones that are crucial to the scientific process but don’t need to be done in the lab. “One of the things missing from BIMM 121 is the chance to discuss results as a class or a chance to dive into literature” she said. “I want to take advantage of that and give students more time to use skills that are more on the science side of things, rather than the technical side of things, like pipetting or what step you spin something down.”

Other activities include more data analysis using bioinformatics and dividing students into groups to create faux lab project proposals. These activities will hopefully promote students’ collaborative skills and programming skills.

“In the future, I think we want to bring some of this balance in. We could also cut out some of the experiments so that we have time in lab for those types of discussions. I think that could be valuable” Petrie said.