Five objectives for online science labs that lend themselves ...

 These are five goals for online science labs.

How to Rethink Science Lab Class Instructions. The rapid transition from college classrooms in the wake COVID-19 has left faculty with little or no time for planning and preparation. There are still many challenging pedagogical issues to be resolved, especially when it comes to how undergraduates learn in online science laboratory classes. However, science labs at the undergraduate levels can be taught online with some modifications. These modifications may prove to be beneficial even after academic life is back to normal.

Touro College is an online college with over 20 years of experience. We provide rigorous training for our faculty to teach our asynchronous courses. We used our expertise to support faculty transitioning to synchronous online teaching. This included Zoom sessions, tutorials, and videos. We made the transition to online teaching very smooth and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from both students and professors. We are happy to share some lessons we have learned regarding teaching online science lab sections.

Online sessions must provide active learning experiences that allow students to question, defend, debate and address real problems. Every student is aware of the COVID-19 outbreak and science classes begin with a review of current information from top peer-reviewed journals.

John Loike, who teaches genetics-immunology at Touro's Lander College for Women, is an example for an online science laboratory. The course started with regular classroom lab instruction. Students learned how to maintain animal cells within the laboratory. The lab section taught students how to maintain mouse microglial cell, which are vital in Parkinson's and Alzheimer disease. This allows students to study the unique characteristics of such cells under normal conditions as well as when they have been treated with certain drugs. The lab taught students how to determine the time taken for cells to divide, assess the toxicity of drugs and treatments, and how to identify the proteins that cells express in normal or drug-induced conditions. Students were also taught how to measure an immunological function that is crucial for the survival of dying neurons, called phagocytosis.

Based on the discussion about this lab, and other science labs we identified five objectives for online laboratories that are essential to science laboratory experiences and can be easily taught online. Online education is a great way to teach students skills that are often forgotten but essential for all scientific disciplines.

Objective 1: Learn how you can propose new scientific research. Each scientist must know how to develop a proposal for research that draws on the existing knowledge in order to answer critical questions. An online lab class allows students to work in groups of two, so they can apply their laboratory experience and understand the techniques to suggest new experiments. Working in pairs allows each student to be heard and can share their ideas.

Focused ultrasound, for example, has been shown to boost immune system function in patients with cancer. Numerous clinical studies have supported this. Two students from our online courses proposed experiments to determine the effects of ultrasound on brain microglial cells functions. The immune system may be boosted by ultrasound, and these cells may be able to perform the function of sanitation engineers, clearing harmful cellular debris. Another group of students proposed experiments to test the effects caffeine on microglia. These experiments were inspired by the published observations that this drug can also affect the immune systems and delay or reduce the severity of Alzheimer’s disease.

Objective 2: Learn how you can critically read peer-reviewed journals, and review the literature. To learn new discoveries and better understand science, scientists should read narrative science or journals. Students learn how to read peer reviewed journal papers online to get ideas about research that has been done on their experiments.

We have students review selected papers related to their experiments and then discuss the strengths and limitations of each paper. PubMed is a site that allows students to search more than 30,000,000 biomedical citations. PubMed offers many filters to help students choose the papers they want to read. To provide background information on a specific topic, students may use the filters to filter out "review" papers.

Students can also look at papers from their professors and pose questions. Students can also review papers published by their professors and ask questions to get a better understanding of academic publishing and scientific inquiry.

Objective 3: Learn how you can design complex research experiments. This level of students does not have much experience in experimental design. However, the National Institutes of Health RePORTER database of grants provides an invaluable tool that very few undergraduates can use to enhance their scientific knowledge. The site gives students the ability to access abstracts from NIH-funded scientists on their NIH grants. Many abstracts provide scientists' perspectives on the questions and types of experiments that can be conducted to answer them. Students can then compare their ideas to scientists who actually propose experiments. This pedagogical approach stimulates and encourages students' creativity to design new experiments.

Fourth Objective: Learn how you can analyze experimental data. It takes special skills to analyze experimental data that aren't taught in a laboratory. Statistics analysis is an essential course for all scientists. Online laboratory sections allow students to have more time to talk about basic information about data analysis such as: How many experiments will it take to get statistical analysis? How can you make the data most clear and precise? How can you present the data in a bar graph, line plot, or other visuals?

Finally, students learn how to write legends for tables and figures. This skill is not taught in statistics classes. For readers to fully understand the results of specific experiments, the legends are essential. For students, professors may also be able to share data from their labs for them to review and practice.

Objective 5: Learn from others. It has been shown that teaching helps with retention and understanding. Students are required to teach one another in online sessions. This can include traditional pedagogic interactions like explaining basic research concepts and presenting research findings to support a hypothesis.

Faculty members may also be able to come up with new and innovative ways of teaching. John has created a game of genetics Jeopardy based on the television show. Students can play it with their professors online. Every other week, students are given the task of creating their own genetics Jeopardy to share with their classmates. Kahoot! Students can also use other online sites to make games and interact with one another.

While virtual labs are not easy to provide, faculty members can transform the way that students think about their labs by moving to online education. Faculty can explore scientific analysis and research topics online in a way they are not able to in face-to–face labs. It will pay off in the long-term, if you can successfully use innovative ways to facilitate interactive education, science will benefit immensely. Five Great Justifications to Sample Virtual Pick