Managing Labs
Labs in higher educations are a crucial part of the hands-on learning experience for students. Whether the discipline is nursing, physics, or chemistry, students have the invaluable opportunity to practice professional skills in a supervised environment. This guide walks you through the basic steps needed to suceed while managing one or more lab sections.
Modifications
Prepare for the Class/Familiarize with Course Structure
Labs can vary dramatically from discipline to discipline. Some labs are packaged as one course with the Are you responsible for the corresponding lecture component?
Some questions you should know before starting your lab:
How many weeks? Often with labs, (similar to flipped learning) students need to
A common format is to set up
Some good questiosn to ask yourself
- Make sure you know the format. Are you running the lab, or do you have TAs leading each section. How many sections are you responsible for?
- Reach out to your lab manager to understand the protocols specific to your departmental labs
Develop Outcomes and Objectives
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Build content in Canvas
- Digitize your safety agreement. You can set up a graded survey in Canvas that will
- Set up a Blueprint course if you are managing more than 3 sections of a course. A blueprint creates a master course that you can update and push changes to your other sections.
- Tie all of your assignments to rubrics. This ensures that students know what is expected of them, and keeps grading uniform across separate sections, labs, and TAs. It also speeds up your grading turn around time!
Many instructors managing labs will create a Blueprint course to
Consider setting up a Blueprint course (link to Blueprint course)
Create rubrics so grading is standardized across your sections
(Meet with an Instructional Designer
Manage multiple courses in one place
Simplify and standardize grading
Digitize your safety agreement
Communication
Make sure to
Teaching Format Modifications
You may find managing a lab can differ between teaching formats. Below are ways in which you can adjust how you approach managing your labs for the various delivery formats that USU offers to their students:
Online
In a remote teaching environment, or with reduced access to laboratory space, certain activities may not be as doable as they would be in a face-to-face setting. However, there may be ways to adjust the activity to reach the same general outcomes, or slightly revised but equally important outcomes.
Example:
One USU teacher identified 3 main learning objectives for her labs: practicing the process of science from start to finish, communicating science through writing, and collaborating in the science process. Upon going remote, she recognized that the first two outcomes were achievable through modifications to her activities, and the third outcome could be modified to instead focus on research ethics.
Strategy:
- List the outcomes you seek to achieve in your labs.
- List additional outcomes your labs could achieve
- If necessary, rank your outcomes by importance.
- List a variety of experiences a student can have to acheive those outcomes.
- Select the outcomes you will focus on and the experiences that are doable in the remote or limited access setting.
- Refer to the links below, which provide various tactics and resources for making more experiences possible in a remote or limited access environment.
- Get help from an instructional designer as needed.
Resources and Articles
- From ASU: Remote Lab Strategies Open External Link
- From Dartmouth: Remote Lab Activities and Experiences Open External Link
- From University of Cincinnatti: Links to online lab resources Open External Link
- From the Chronicle of Higher Education: How to quickly (and safely) move labs online Open External Link
Additional Resources
- Need a consultation with an Instructional Designer? See CIDI's Contact Us page for contact details and appointment scheduler.