By Talaina Kor During the Navajo County Community College Governing Board meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 16, the board heard from Amelinda Webb and Pat Lopez of the Northland Pioneer College Faculty Association, who gave a presentation on how some of the faculty have been conducting online lab sciences amid the pandemic. In March of 2020, all science courses were moved to online, which began with a course taught by Dr. Webb, who organized and taught NPC’s first ever lab science course to be done completely online. “In consultation with Dr. Webb, faculty who teach Bio 181 got together weekly on Zoom to redesign the course for online instruction,” stated Professor Lopez. Other biology and geology courses followed suit. “We are collectively teaching seven lab courses fully online,” added Lopez. Lopez explained their core objectives for teaching lab courses online were safety, engagement, interactivity, hands-on learning and quality. “For us, what that translated to was 100 percent online, synchronous, and kit-based classes.” Dr. Webb discussed the struggle of thinking how to go about teaching lab classes online. “I really had to spend a lot of time thinking how do I achieve the goals? What are the learning objectives that I need to meet that normally would be a lot easier because I would be in the lab with the students that could get hands-on experience; I could take them out in the field to do fieldtrips. How do I recreate that completely online at a distance? How do we do science online?” An important tool Webb used in her online classes was Google Drive and Zoom. “It allows interactive collaboration in real time,” stated Webb, “And because we have these synchronic labs where the students were in the Zoom room and I could actually break them into breakout rooms.” Another important aspect of online teaching was to get students to actually do hands-on experiments as they would in a lab. To do this, kits were created then sent out to students. “The kits cost anywhere from $30 to $265 to put together,” stated Lopez. “The cost of putting together these kits was absorbed by the respective departments. Students were not charged anything additional on top on the $40 lab fee.” The college assembled a total of 440 kits for two semesters, all to be returned at the end of the respective semester. “It took a small army of people to develop, assemble, and distribute the kits. This was particularly challenging in some of the outlying areas where some of the local communities were in lockdown at the start of the semester.” Faculty personally drove kits out to these places, such as the Kayenta and Hopi centers. While NPC faculty have been successful in making online teaching work, Lopez stated that it should only be used when needed. “This way of teaching, while necessary at this time, is costly. It excludes far too many of our students who don’t have high quality internet connection and most importantly it cannot replicate certain aspects of in person lab teaching.”
