Designing a Hybrid Biopharmaceutical Laboratory Course to Enhance Content Flexibility and Access

Herein we report the design of an upper-level hybrid laboratory course in the area of applied biopharmaceuticals, which has high scheduling flexibility, and utilizes both virtual and in-person educational elements to enhance students learning experience. This newly developed course applies chemical engineering knowledge, practical and theoretical, in the bioprocess and pharmaceutical industry, including crystallization, chromatography, and mass transport. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we transferred this lab course to a completely virtual mode during midsemester of Spring 2020. Despite the lack of in-person experiments during the second half of the semester, we introduced various additional elements including modeling, simulation, literature review, and added lectures to the virtual version of the course to improve students learning experience. These additional elements introduced during the virtual period enriched the course content and exposed students to more advanced applications of the knowledge in this course, which can be implemented in future hybrid modes. Although the student performance on quizzes and lab reports remained consistent after the transition to online format, the instructors noticed students struggling with data mined from previous groups. The root cause of this was not being able to create and observe their own data in real time, which could be improved by developing better remote data collection methods. Another lesson we learned during this experience is the value of keeping an experimental video archive for all of our laboratory modules, regardless of plans for remote learning.