Learning management systems play a crucial role in addressing pedagogical challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The solutions provided by the learning management systems (LMS) facilitated online instructions and helped form a community of learning and support. With the rapid increased usage during the pandemic and the return to face-to-face…

The COVID-19 pandemic not only affected education at its peak, it continues to affect learning in its aftermath. High schools were forced to transition to remote learning, throwing students and educators alike into a new reality. Recovering from the pandemic has forced the need for innovative ways to engage students. Some successful attempts at…

Disruptions to education systems (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) evoke a range of responses from teachers. Teachers are required to learn new skills, attend to students' social emotional needs, modify their instructional approaches, and discover innovative ways to engage their students in science, technology, and engineering courses, all while…

Active engagement is critical to student success in Organic Chemistry. In this paper, I trace the trajectory of student engagement in an introductory organic chemistry lecture series over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. I detail my approach to cultivating student engagement in an online environment, evaluate the success of these approaches…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic we were confronted with the transition of a large, on-campus introductory soil science course into an online setting. This created several challenges, such as providing meaningful learning experiences to engage first- and second-year students, and restructuring course content for the online environment. The objective…

With the unprecedented shift to online or flexible learning modes, both teachers and students adapt to the new normal of education. A qualitative study aimed to draw out the voices of three beginning science teachers, the study utilized the narrative inquiry approach through in-depth interviews. It was found that beginning science teachers are…

Team-based learning (TBL) is a research-based instructional practice (RBIP) shown to increase students' content knowledge, class engagement, motivation, and science self-efficacy. After several years of using TBL in an upper-division biochemistry course and noting the same positive effects, we were hesitant to abandon TBL when forced to consider…

With the global pandemic this spring, we experienced a switch to remote education halfway through our semester at The College of New Jersey. For an advanced special topics in chemical biology class, lecture and group work required changes, increasing the number of assignments as well as the level of independent thinking and application-based…

Within the 'normal' English National Curriculum for science it is usual in Rebecca Price's school for year 6 children (ages 10-11) to investigate how animals have adapted to suit their environment. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has had to adapt, in an international team effort, to an ever-changing environment. Full immersion in…

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, all teachers' training courses scheduled for summer 2020 had to transition to online formats. For the arts-integrating course "Teaching Chemistry by a Creative Approach", this shift jeopardized the course's essence, since learning by this approach is based on creative, hands-on, and active learning. Here…

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, anatomy education was forced to adopt online modes of delivery. Previous research on student views revealed areas of strong preference (asynchronous lectures) and strong dislike (virtual specimens) in online anatomy courses. The current study seeks to compare the views of a single cohort of students…

This project aims to understand physics faculty responses to transitioning to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed 662 physics faculty from the United States following the Spring 2020 term; of these, 258 completed a follow-up survey after the Fall 2020 term. We used natural language processing to measure the sentiment scores…

Beginning abruptly in the second half of the Spring 2020 semester at Purdue University, we modified our teaching approach in Introductory Soil Science and Forest Soils courses (AGRY 255/270) with a combined annual enrollment of [approximately]370 students to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. In that semester, we went to entirely virtual lecture,…

Higher education has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, disrupting universities worldwide. Unexpectedly, the global academic community was forced to transition to remote and online learning. In many cases, fragilities in the systems of the higher education institutions were exposed, pointing to the need for investment in…

As a result of the spread of COVID-19 during spring 2020, many colleges and universities across the U.S., and beyond, were compelled to move entirely to remote, online instruction, or shut down. Due to the rapidity of this transition, instructors had to significantly--if not completely--change their instructional style on very short notice. Our…