What Worked, What Did Not: University Instruction during a Pandemic

In this report, we discuss the experience of both lecturing and teaching laboratory classes during a pandemic at the University of Mississippi (UM). UM is a relatively rural university with approximately 20 000 students. The instructional approaches that we attempted would be significantly more difficult to implement at universities with larger class sizes, geographically more restricted with regard to climate, or more urban with confined space, yet we observed many failures, even at a rural, spacious campus. Here, we note the various models of instruction that—in our case—could be separated into three approaches: in-person (i.e., traditional face-to-face instruction), online only, and a hybrid model with some component of the two (1). We discuss our experiences of what went right and what went wrong with each approach. Given that similar approaches have been undertaken around the globe, we use this report to relate what we observed as both effective and noneffective for our style of university, with special emphasis on physical biochemical laboratory training of students.