ABSTRACT
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions were forced to make difficult decisions regarding the 2020-2021 academic year. Many institutions decided to have courses in an online remote format, others decided to attempt an in-person experience, while still others took a hybrid approach. Hope College (Holland, MI) decided that an in-person semester would be safer and more equitable for students. To achieve this at a residential college required broad collaboration across multiple stakeholders. Here, we share lessons learned and detail Hope College's model, including wastewater surveillance, comprehensive testing, contact tracing, and isolation procedures that allowed us to deliver on our commitment of an in-person, residential college experience.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Education, Distance , Pandemics , Humans , Pandemics/prevention & control , SARS-CoV-2 , UniversitiesABSTRACT
Campus shutdowns during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic posed unique challenges to faculty and students engaged in laboratory courses. Formerly hands-on experiments had to be quickly pivoted to emergency remote learning. While some resources existed prior to this period, many currently available online modules and/or simulations focus on a single technique. The Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Lab (BASIL) curriculum has, for several years, provided a robust, linked, holistic inquiry experience that allows students to make connections between multiple techniques, both computational in nature as well as wet-lab-based. As a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), this flexible, module-based curriculum allows students to generate original hypotheses based on analysis of proteins of unknown function. We have taught this curriculum as the upper-level laboratory course on our campuses and were obliged to transition to remote instruction at various points in the course sequence. We report on the experiences of faculty and students over the transition period in this course. Additionally, we report as a case study results of one of our campus ongoing discipline-based education research (DBER) on the BASIL curriculum prior to and during remote delivery.