The Modality Shuffle: Why Students Deserve a Familiar Lab Experience Every Semester

Imagine this.

You signed up to take your first biology lab on campus. You dissected a frog, extracted DNA, tested enzyme reactions, and learned proper pipette technique. The experience even inspired you to take another lab, this time an Anatomy & Physiology lab online. But it was different. No dissection, no ability to handle specimens, and limited opportunity to examine bone structure up close. You feel you came away with only a superficial understanding of the human body and never signed up for another lab.

That’s what happens when a student has a lackluster and inconsistent experience. They no longer feel inspired to continue down this path, and you’ve just lost a student. 

Students, including your on-campus students, crave flexibility. In fact, according to data from CHLOE 9, 60% of chief online learning officers report that their institution’s online courses now fill up first, while 77% said that students using on-campus housing are asking for online options. Often thought of as separate pools of students, your online students and your on-campus students are and should be treated as one in the same, especially important as students shuffle up modalities across their schedule. 

The Importance of Equitable Experiences 

Uniformity across course formats is more than just a nice-to-have; it’s a cornerstone of trust. At any given point in a student’s academic journey with you, a student will be setting up their bench in your on-campus lab, logging into a virtual simulation, doing labs from home, or navigating a hybrid setup. Variability in the quality of that student’s experience across modalities can lead to frustration and doubts about the institution’s ability to provide equitable education.

Beyond student expectations, accreditation standards often require uniformity in learning outcomes across modalities. Meeting these standards isn’t just about compliance; it’s about signaling to prospective students that your programs are designed to deliver excellence, no matter how or where they’re accessed. Consistent delivery not only enhances student satisfaction but also differentiates programs in an increasingly competitive market.

In addition to losing out on potential enrollment, an inconsistent learning experience across online or in-person modalities will only enlarge the current learning gap.

Growing the Learning Gap

As many instructors will tell you, too many students currently lack necessary prerequisite knowledge, in part due to the learning loss resulting from the pandemic. 

As one tenured faculty member shared in the 2024 Annual Lab Report, “Student preparedness is the biggest challenge I face in the classroom. Students are taking twice as long to complete a lab than pre-COVID students, but the labs are the same. Students are less prepared when they come to class and they are not doing the work before class. They come into a lab setting having no idea what they will be doing.”

According to the report, 80% of campus faculty and deans/department chairs felt that students’ lack of preparedness and pre-requisite knowledge was a challenge, while more than half of students said they feel the same. Lacking confidence and feeling under-prepared can directly impact student performance, whereas learners with higher confidence are more willing to learn, challenge themselves, and have better resilience in the face of difficult challenges. 

Yet, with students taking labs in a variety of course formats—online, on-campus, hybrid, blended—there’s increased probability that their experiences will vary, which threatens to exacerbate the learning gap. Creating consistency in what and how students learn in your course, regardless of course format, will work to narrow the learning gap, better prepare students, and enrich the overall learning experience for students.

Best Practices for Building Familiar Lab Experience Across Formats

Whether you’re instructing from behind a screen or in front of a classroom, students want to come away from your course richer in ideas, skills, and knowledge. A consistent learning experience, whether students learn fully online, fully in-person, or prefer a blend, is key to ensuring a level of equity in students’ experiences, improving accessibility, and as a result, extending the reach of science education beyond just those able to travel to campus.

Online science labs shouldn’t be watered-down versions of your on-campus courses. Similarly, on-campus students should have opportunities to practice and reinforce learning outside the classroom. All students deserve high quality learning experiences, which is why it’s important to use many of the same strategies across formats and from semester to semester. 

Communicate Expectations in the Same Ways

No matter the delivery format of your course, clarity in expectations and guidance is essential for every student. Anticipating student needs ensures a smoother learning journey. 

Tips for Setting Expectations:

• Centralized Resources: Provide clear directions on accessing course materials and explain their alignment with course objectives.
• Due Date Visibility: Highlight deadlines for labs and assignments in a syllabus or visible online rubric tied to learning outcomes.
• Experiment Guidance: Offer detailed resources, including time estimates for each lab activity.
• Feedback Mechanisms: Use tools to provide ongoing feedback, enabling students to improve and stay motivated.

Whether your course is online or in-person, use lab management tools that make providing that feedback easier. With tools like this, you can focus your time on giving quality ongoing feedback to help students improve, which is proven to motivate students to continue engaging in your course. 

Align Curriculum Across Formats

A course’s goals and learning objectives should remain consistent, whether delivered online or in person. High-quality, adaptable curricula are key to providing students with the skills they need to succeed. Be sure your curriculum is adaptable across formats and meets the following criteria. 

Comprehensive Lab Curriculum for Online or F2F:

• Covers 14 disciplines, all certified by Quality Matters
• Developed by PhD scientists 
• Reviewed by instructional designers for quality, accuracy, repeatability, safety, and ADA compliance. 

Give ALL Students the Hands-on Experience

Hands-on learning isn’t just for on-campus students. Incorporating physical experiments into online courses using hands-on kits creates a richer, more rigorous learning experience. Similarly, using hands-on kits for your on-campus courses not only creates uniformity across experiences but also will help you optimize your on-campus lab operation. 

Why prioritize hands-on across modalities 

• Increased Engagement and Understanding: Studies show hands-on labs improve understanding and retention of material.
• Comparable Experiences:  75% of instructors teaching an online course with hands-on labs said they felt that these labs were comparable to an in-person lab experience.
• Real-World Skills: 90% of students say hands-on labs prepare them to apply learning in real-world scenarios.

What’s more, a student shouldn’t have to come on campus just so they earn credit to transfer. Incorporating a hands-on component helps ensure students can use your course for transfer credit. 

Similarly, consider using hands-on kits for your on-campus courses. For example, Professor Jones at Aiken Technical College uses Science Interactive to remove the burden of sourcing materials for her pharmacy technician courses so that she can focus on the areas that will help drive better student outcomes: constructive feedback and student reflection.

Otherwise, she would spend valuable time trying to track down materials, often creating inconsistency in the type of materials and supplies. To remove these challenges, she selected hands-on experiments, kits and lessons from Science Interactive’s Pharmacy Technician offerings that are aligned with her course learning outcomes. This ensures her students can participate in the same kind of lab activities they’ll experience in a real pharmacy. 

Combine Hands-on with Virtual Labs

Virtual simulations are a valuable supplement to hands-on labs, offering students opportunities to practice and explore concepts in a low-stakes environment. Regardless of modality, virtual labs when paired with hands-on labs offer multiple benefits:

• Allowing students to repeat experimentation to reinforce understanding
• Facilitating observation of phenomena that are unsafe or unobservable in physical labs
• Helping to balance costs 

With each experiment, students can manipulate variables, run the experiment, and immediately see the results. With each run, students engage more deeply with the concept, which is helpful for struggling students or those who need to repeat activities for a deeper understanding, working to reinforce hands-on learning.

In addition to using virtual simulations in online labs, consider their use for F2F courses to:

• Train students in experimental procedures and safety protocols.
• Save lab time by introducing techniques in advance.
• Increase confidence through trial experiments.

Students can go at their own pace and practice navigating problems and repeating the simulation as many times as needed—all before walking into the campus laboratory. They will feel more prepared and confident in their abilities when they enter your lab, having gone through a virtual simulation of the lab and seen safety measures and lab techniques in action—extremely valuable for non-majors or for those students taking a lab for the first time.

Foster Community & Support

Finally, no student—online or on-campus—will be successful without community and support. While on-campus lab students are sure to experience a sense of class community and collaborate with a lab partner, don’t let online students go without.

Strategies for Online Community Building:

• Pair students as virtual lab partners to encourage peer support, foster interactive science labs online.
• Facilitate discussions on lab activities to promote collaboration and critical thinking.
• Create Q&A boards for crowdsourced answers and collective learning.
• Host virtual office hours for one-on-one or group interaction.

Instructors we surveyed as part of our Annual Lab Report said they use the following methods regardless of modality to provide students with more guidance and support:

• Office hours
• Closely monitoring students 
• Using discussion boards so students can interact
• Providing additional material and pre-recorded videos 
• Using virtual simulations and hands-on labs

When students feel they belong to a class community, they are more likely to be motivated to complete class work, feel safe enough to ask questions or for more help, and be open to feedback that can help them improve—improving their performance and overall learning. 

Together, with clear communication, hands-on and virtual simulations as well as pre-lab activities, these tactics can help boost student performance and better prepare students—no matter where they’re learning from.

An All-In-One Solution to Standardize, Scale & Support Student Success

While there are certainly unique challenges with delivering science labs online, including ensuring student preparedness, quality, and rigor, as well as recreating hands-on lab work, many programs have been able to deliver online labs successfully, using proven strategies that both expand access to their programs and ensure a quality learning experience. 

On the flip, your on-campus students need to continue engaging outside of the classroom. Don’t be afraid to assign them virtually simulated labs as pre-lab preparation, which will work to reinforce hands-on learning and give them a chance to practice at their own pace—all of which lead to a more rigorous learning experience and a more equitable playing field. 

The most successful programs will be able to adapt to the way their students learn, introduce a uniform approach across modalities, and as a result, deliver an effective and meaningful experience from wherever students are sitting.