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Justin Fair, a professor in the Madia Department of Chemistry in the Kopchick College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, had previous experience teaching a graduate course online. Now that he's delivering all of his courses remotely, including chemistry labs, his perspective on face-to-face learning hasn't changed.

What's been the biggest adjustment you've had to make to teach online?

Teaching labs online has been the most difficult transformation. I teach the two-semester Organic Chemistry Lab, which is four hours a week. Luckily, one of my students, Randall Koziel (a senior who will be attending graduate school at West Virginia University), has helped me film all the remaining labs. Since then, we have been adding many of the face-to-face components using D2L and Zoom.

Here is one example of the videos we have made.

How much have you had to change the curriculum to fit online delivery?

I also teach a graduate course that was already online, so that course did not require any modifications.

But the lab was the big one to change. In a face-to-face lab, there are notebook checks, workbook checks, and teamwork points. I found the OneDrive app was a game changer. I had the students create a course folder and share the folder with me. Then they could scan the notebooks and other assignments and upload them directly from their phone to their OneDrive folder. D2L provided easy tools for their direct linking without having to upload or email large files. Sadly, the lab changed from teams of two to a more individual task-based course, but this was done so the students have more flexibility to access the lab's content.