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[mythbuster]

    I am on the committee to revise and "improve" our lab non-majors Biology course. The GE requirements at our university require one lab and one non-lab science course. Our lab GE course has the dubious distinction of being both the departmental cash cow (from the lab fees) and the biggest suck of space an manpower resources (classrooms and TAs to run the 3 hour sections). So we are trying to "reinvent" the lab so it is less of a resource hog. Ideas have spanned the gamut from online virtual labs, to case study discussion groups, to a company that sells a "lab in a box" for students to do the experiments in their dorm room (an idea I find terrifying).
   So I turn to the all knowing fora with this philosophical question: What makes a course a Lab course? While I would love for these students to have the full on wet lab experience, it's just not going to happen for a number of reasons. Help me make this a good "lab 2.0" experience for these students.

[professor_pat]

Bookmarking - great question.

[anon99]

Depends on what you are teaching in the course.  For natural selection and phylogeny type labs, there are some free online programs with tutorials that are good. 

[goingbatty]

There are also some expensive (but not too expensive) online labs that I have used when doing ecology outside in December is appealing to exactly nobody.

http://simbio.com/

I have found that students don't engage with them as much as they do with physical labs, though -- even though I think that they sometimes convey the point more clearly!

[anon99]

There are also some expensive (but not too expensive) online labs that I have used when doing ecology outside in December is appealing to exactly nobody.

http://simbio.com/

I have found that students don't engage with them as much as they do with physical labs, though -- even though I think that they sometimes convey the point more clearly!

The evobeaker ones on the simbio website are similar, more recent versions of the free ones I posted above.  There are also some free ones on the simbio websites.

[mythbuster]

Goingbatty and anon99,
  OP here. Thanks for the suggestions. I already know about SimBio and the like. My question is more holistic though. Does just having students do online simulations fill the requirement for a lab course? Should it?
    I know there are lots of options out there, I just have trouble believing doing all online simulations is really a lab experience. It really comes down to what the purpose is of having a lab for any course. I'm very much against this "do it on the cheap" move although the labs they currently do are not exactly expensive, or terribly exciting.

[seniorscholar]

Can the course be structured so that each student gets a real lab 3 times a semester and thus all of them get lab experience but it only takes one-fourth of the space and TA time?

I can't actually figure out how this would work without a syllabus I could not possibly create, since my last science class was before most of you were born, but I seem to remember that as an undergraduate, when I was taking an actual chemistry course (which, to be honest, was a repeat of my high-school chemistry class only it moved slower and took longer . . .) one of my dorm-mates took a "General Science" gen-ed class that seemed to have lab every three or four weeks instead of every week (and then brought me her lab manual to tell her what was wrong, which was just about everything).

[mythbuster]

Seniorscholar, we would have to work out the scheduling of the rooms, but what you suggest might work. I could almost see an "open lab" type situation where you had to show up to lab period one of the three available weeks. Although I wonder if we would get a log jab in that last week. I had a Physics class in high school that only had lab every other week. We could fill in the other weeks with online stuff. Not a bad idea.

[unusedusername]

Call me old-fashoned, but unless students are using real laboratory equipment under the supervision of an expert in the field, it is not a laboratory course.  If it is so easy that they can do it at home, it isn't rigorous enough for a science class, and computer simulations are no substitute for getting your hands dirty.  As Bloom would say, learning labwork is part of the psychomotor domain, and no amount of cognitive knowledge will substitute for it.  There are also the obvious safety/liability issues.  If your institution cannot provide the resources for an actual lab, the only honest thing to do is to stop offering lab-science courses.

[archman]

The biggest general trend in non-majors biology courses I am seeing right now is a reduction in contact hours from 3 hours to 2 hours. This "model" both permits an improved mass production system of teaching (more labs crammed into one day), and also reduces equipment needs. Basically, any equipment or technique that takes much time to figure out has to be budgeted into the slashed class period.

I have observed several of these 2-hour non-majors labs at multiple universities. Many are now barren of most equipment and supplies. Teaching students how to use that stuff takes too much time, so the labs got rid of a lot of it. Or maybe they get rid of the supplies because they are now poor... same end result. Heh.

So you can save mega bucks by dropping to 2 contact hours. I have also seen great success with college writing initiatives. Make your non-majors labs participate in that, by taking up lots of lab time showing them how to write scientific papers and "think critically".  Your administration will gobble that junk up like honey.
Paper writing consumes hardly any lab resources, and you can blow whole class periods on it. If you try to push that on most faculty lab instructors, they will kill you. But if you use slave labor grad students that don't talk back, assigning 2-3 research papers in your lab classes might make it through your departmental committee.

Man, I wish I was making this stuff up.

[ironproffen]

I don't have many specific resource-saving ideas for you, but I did want to respond to the question in the thread title.

I think one needs to consider the purpose of requiring a lab-based science course as part of the general education curriculum. As far as I can say, the main purpose is to teach students how scientists use laboratory approaches to address questions about the natural and physical world. I do not think it necessarily needs to involve teaching students how to use the same instrumentation that scientists use, but I would think it preferable to include some use of instrumentation to demonstrate that aspect of modern science.

In my opinion, this would require a certain number of hours spent "doing science" under the supervision of well-trained scientists.

OK, one money-saving idea; include some computational time (doing simulations, doing statistical analysis, making graphs). This does assume access to at least one computer per lab group, but you might even get by with asking students to bring one laptop per group. It has the advantage that you can use existing data sets from year to year, and it is highly relevant to how scientists actually "do" science.

[jackofallchem]

I don't have many specific resource-saving ideas for you, but I did want to respond to the question in the thread title.

I think one needs to consider the purpose of requiring a lab-based science course as part of the general education curriculum. As far as I can say, the main purpose is to teach students how scientists use laboratory approaches to address questions about the natural and physical world. I do not think it necessarily needs to involve teaching students how to use the same instrumentation that scientists use, but I would think it preferable to include some use of instrumentation to demonstrate that aspect of modern science.

One of the purposes of such a class is to teach the students how scientists learn what they know.  How do they know?  I have them measure the acceleration due to gravity, measure the thickness of a hair with a laser, see how you can  identify a gas by its emission spectrum, and measure the length of a molecule using rudimentary tools (a syringe, paper plate, calipers, and baby powder).  Science is different from history.  I can't go back to make sure that Alfred the Great existed or did everything the history books said he did, but I can look at the light form the sun and determine what gases are present using the spectroscope.  Someone observed these things, they came up with an idea about how they work and they tested it.  Now I can apply this knowlegde. 

The point of the lab is not to have them do something you can justify as a lab to charge them money to increase department revenues.  Undergraduate labs are not cash cows, they never have been.  They may bring in money, but they cost money too.  They are more labor-intensive than a lecture, you can't pack 600 people into a lab with one instructor, and you have to have enough expensive equipment for each student to use in a 3-4 hour period.  Lectures bring in a lot more money than labs.  if labs break even, you are doing pretty good.  If you want to increase revenues, offer an elective lecture on viticulture and wine making.  That should pack them in.  "How to Brew Beer In Your Dorm Room" would also work.