Aaaaand UMBC is fully online for summer courses.

I'm slated to teach gen chem lab this summer. Now I have to figure out what to do with that.

I could do what we did with emergency remote teaching. Online lab simulators with our existing lab manual. It's weird. It's artificial. It's so many steps removed from science that it only barely felt appropriate with emergency teaching.

The idea that our entire gen chem lab would be like that makes me pause to consider if it's worth the effort.

I could cancel the course. (I'm not sure I have that power, but maybe). But that affects students who need the course for degree progression. And I don't know if we have enrollment capacity to make up for it in the fall.

(What if fall is online...? Eek.)

Aren't there kits you can send students to do gen chem at home? That actually seems like the best of several bad options to me. They still aren't learning safety in the same way, they aren't getting the experience of a real lab, but at least they'd get to use their hands.

And of course, this is just gen chem. We have organic and analytical slated to run this summer. Should we run them? If so, how?

This decision feels a lot different to me than the move to emergency online. For spring term, our students were already halfway through. They'd learned to navigate the lab room and been introduced to much of the equipment.

And the online alternative for spring term was to cancel labs and effectively delay graduation for a year for all the students in lab courses.

I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of what I'm thinking right now, but I have to go to toddler music class, so this is it. Please share whatever thoughts you have. What are your schools doing?

Update: looks like we're strongly considering no labs this summer. Working through those details in-house at the moment.