From Social Distancing to Enhanced Learning in the Laboratory

The COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly remain an infamous landmark in the world of higher education. While every area of education was impacted, overcoming the challenges of reduced capacity, remote learning, etc. was a particular challenge in laboratory settings. Similar to many others, our institution's return to campus included a Hyflex modality (i.e., students rotating through in-person and remote learning for individual lessons) to allow for social distancing within classroom spaces. Following these guidelines, our environmental engineering laboratory space could only accommodate one-third of the registered students in each of the Spring 2021 lab sections. To overcome this, I created a weekly rotational schedule of in-person, virtual, and field/home activities, which allowed me to still give each student a full three-hour lab session for each exercise. This rotational schedule left me with smaller groups of students for the in-person labs and increased my ability to assess individual student progress toward specific learning objectives. Students indicated that this implementation allowed them to work more independently on experiments, improved skill development and retention, and ultimately created a more personal learning environment. In addition to student feedback, I will also evaluate how the rotational system impacted student content mastery based on assignment grades. Finally, I will present lessons learned and suggestions for continuing this model in a post-COVID world. As we return to our "new normal," we should deliberately and critically evaluate whether our pandemic-induced innovations created an enhanced learning environment when compared to traditional course delivery.