Beginning in March 2020, instructors and students in educational institutions across the world have had to adapt to new virtual methods of teaching and learning. This study focused on obtaining the student perspective of remote chemistry lecture delivery methods across 13 Fall 2020 courses with students in varied majors of study and stages of degree completion. For students who experienced a mixture of asynchronous and synchronous content delivery within the same course, a majority of students preferred the asynchronous model. When all student participants were asked which content delivery model they would prefer, should remote learning continue, the majority of students indicated that a hybrid mixture of both asynchronous and synchronous opportunities would best support their learning. This was followed by a fully asynchronous model with fully synchronous being least preferred. While students in all years of study showed a preference for the hybrid model with even preferences for fully asynchronous and synchronous models, second-year students were more likely to select asynchronous learning over synchronous. For courses providing recorded synchronous content, the majority of students attended the live class, while a significant portion also made further use of the provided recordings, suggesting recorded content may be worth pursuing for future remote or in-person courses.

The COVID-19 pandemic of Spring 2020 saw chemistry instructors across the globe working to deliver traditional hands-on laboratory learning within a remote learning environment. This study focused on the student perspective on remote laboratory delivery models across 13 Fall 2020 chemistry courses with students from all four years of undergraduate study and varying declared majors. For those students who were able to experience in-person laboratory experiments, the majority indicated that they were of high value to their overall learning experience. Specifically, the students noted that the value of the in-person experiential laboratory learning was tied to their ability to learn and practice their technical skills while putting the theory learned in class into practical context and application. Remote laboratory alternatives in the form of video-recorded experiments and online simulations were seen to be less valuable to the overall student learning experience. While students indicated that they highly valued in-person laboratory experiences and would like to see them continually implemented within their learning experiences, careful design and implementation of remote alternatives may provide meaningful alternatives when in-person laboratory instruction is not possible or perhaps enhance already existing laboratory curricula.

Laboratory skills assignments were developed as a novel approach to providing students with the opportunity to engage in hands-on laboratory skills development outside of the lab during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the assignments were implemented within a second-year forensic chemistry course of 48 students and redesigned and modified to be implemented within a large in-person second-year analytical chemistry course of 208 students as a complement to the laboratory experiments. Five laboratory skills were chosen to coincide with those used within the laboratory experiments of the course: pipetting, quantitative transfer, serial dilutions, buret use within titrations, and weightby-difference mass measurements. Each skills assignment consisted of two videos demonstrating the selected skill: one in which the skill was performed properly and one in which deliberate errors have been included. For each skills assignment, students were tasked with distinguishing between the two videos along with identifying the included errors and the consequences each error would have on either the accuracy and reproducibility of the collected data or the safety of the experimental procedure. Student feedback on the skills assignments is also reported.

The ability of students to perform quantitative analysis is a fundamental aspect of analytical chemistry courses and laboratories. In this laboratory experiment, students quantitatively analyze both liquid and solid samples through the use of internal standard calibration and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy. Using a problem-based approach to selecting their internal standards, students gain a deeper understanding of the internal standard method of calibration and the process of selecting appropriate standards for the analysis of sodium benzoate and acetophenone. This experiment allows students to explore the internal standard method of calibration under a wider context of quality control and quality assurance as they frame their quantitative analyses through both internal and external quality assurance testing methods. In a survey of students undertaking this experiment, most students responded that the experiment provided them with a better understanding of the internal standard method of calibration, and the selection of internal standards, and offered them an opportunity to gain hands-on experience with ATR-FTIR spectroscopy.