Thinking Outside of the Academic Box

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has posed major challenges to education at all levels. Both instructors and students have had to adjust to learning on virtual platforms such as Blackboard. Moving traditional courses online while maintaining high academic standards can be difficult, especially with hands-on laboratory courses. We believed that we could achieve this goal by “thinking outside of the academic box”. The Blackboard learning management system had a number of features we had not used in the face-to-face environment, including the creation of wikis as a substitute for in-class presentations, and journaling as a substitute for paper laboratory reports. Combining these features with the content-rich resources of YouTube and various online educational resources (OER), we developed learning opportunities that met the objectives of two laboratory science courses. We believe this new combination of educational resources should be retained after the resumption of face-to-face instruction.