Everything changed on March 11, 2020: I wasn’t devastated when the Skyline College campus closed for the Spring 2020 semester. Afterall, the students and I knew each other, and the students had half a semester of actual laboratory experience. They had used microscopes, micropipettes, spectrophotometers, and growth chambers. Consequently, I didn’t feel too badly giving them previous semesters’ photographs and data to interpret.

On the other hand, being told classes would be online for the Fall semester was devastating. Like I tell my students, if Levi-Montalcini could do Nobel Prize winning work hiding from the Nazies, I can do this. I spent the summer modifying the “real” BIOL 215 labs so students could do them at home. My plan was to use materials that the College could easily and safely provide and materials that students could easily get outside (e.g., a flower, a lichen).
Plants nicely lend themselves to this.

• Flower dissection for reproduction
• Endosperm storage compounds
• Gravitropism with corn seeds and Brassica seedlings
• Phototropism with Brassica seedlings
• Mitosis in pea seedlings
• Photomorphogenesis with lettuce see

Animals are a different story. Students could collect pillbugs to study behavior—then what? Carolina Biological has a pig dissection kit (pig, tray, utensils) that we used for mammalian anatomy.
The foldscope was a pleasant surprise. It worked perfectly for students to prepare slides and to see

• stomates and trichomes.
• lichen symbionts.
• pollen.
• sponge spicules

I even managed some metabolism experiments:

• respiration in beans
• photosynthesis and wavelength in Elodea

Some microscope work (mitosis and development in animals) had to be relegated to looking at my photos of slides. And bioassays required using data from previous semesters.
Meiosis was a paper-chromosome lab, but we only use pop beads in the face-to-face lab.
A couple of labs required comparisons of various leaves and skulls. For these, I photographed our normal lab specimens and made flipbooks.

I admit I had fun developing the labs but I feared that the only science would be the science involved in developing the labs. That turned out not to be the case. It’s the end of the semester, and the labs were better than I expected. The students really “did science,” got good results to analyze, and managed everything professionally. Students even successfully cloned African violets. The College-provided lab kit was invaluable. One student commented “I had lots of fun doing cool labs.”

However, this is no substitute for an actual laboratory. In lab, students share data and can compare their experimental designs to teach each other. Students learn to use equipment and we troubleshoot experiments that don’t work as expected. Troubleshooting in an invaluable skill for the students and quite useful for me to perfect an experiment. Online lectures are no substitute for face-to-face lectures where students’ understanding and responses and be seen, rhetorical questions can be asked, and students can interact spontaneously with the instructor and with each other.