The COVID-19 pandemic presented numerous
challenges for all levels
of the education system. In March 2020, virtually all colleges and
universities in the United States moved all instruction to an online
environment as a result of the pandemic. While this posed challenges
for all faculty, it posed a particular challenge for those faculty
members who taught laboratory courses. By their nature, laboratory
courses are a hands-on experience for students, and shifting them
to an online format will necessarily change what students will do
during their laboratory experience. In this reflection, the difficulties
that were encountered in switching an Instrumental Analysis lab course
to an online format will be discussed. The ideas deployed to address
these challenges included providing current students with data collected
by students in previous years and assigning them simulations to allow
them to collect their own data. Some of the methods employed were
more successful than others, but none of them were able to completely
replicate the experience they would have received by actually being
in the lab and conducting the analysis themselves. In the process
of attempting to teach Instrumental Analysis in an online environment,
it has become obvious that the time that students typically perceive
as downtime where they do not see anything happening is important
to their understanding of the data they collect.