Squirreling from Afar: Adapting Squirrel-Net Modules for Remote Teaching and Learning

The shift from face-to-face instruction to remote teaching and learning has proven to be a challenging endeavor for many reasons, including lack of time, resources, and inspiration. Lab courses, the “hands-on” portion of many curricula, may be especially difficult to adapt to online learning given the common use of specialized equipment, materials, and techniques that require close supervision. Without the time and resources to creatively modify existing activities or create new ones, remote lab courses run the risk of becoming less effective, equitable, and/or engaging. Squirrel-Net has created four fieldbased activities for biology labs that are easy to implement, highly flexible for different course aims, and readily adaptable to a remote learning environment. In this essay, we briefly summarize the modules and propose several ways that each can be adjusted to accommodate online teaching and learning. By providing authentic learning opportunities through distance delivery we hope to promote widespread student engagement and creative solutions for instructors. Citation: Dizney L, Varner J, Duggan JM, Lanier HC, Connors PK, Erb LP, Flaherty EA, Yahnke CJ, Hanson JD. 2021. Squirreling from afar: Adapting Squirrel-Net modules for remote teaching and learning. CourseSource. https://doi.org/10.24918/cs.2021.2 Editor: Luanna Prevost, University of South Florida Received: 9/23/2020; Accepted: 12/21/2020; Published: 1/27/2021 Copyright: © 2021 Dizney, Varner, Duggan, Lanier, Connors, Erb, Flaherty, Yahnke, and Hanson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The authors affirm that we own the copyright to all text, figures, tables, artwork, abstract, summaries, and supporting materials. Conflict of Interest and Funding Statement: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under a collaborative grant (Nos. 2013483, 2013281, 2013308, and 2013320). PKC, JMD, and JV were supported by the 2019 CourseSource Writing Studio. Support for EAF was provided by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Project 1019737. None of the authors has a financial, personal, or professional conflict of interest related to this work. *Correspondence to: 5000 N Willamette Blvd, Portland, OR 97203. Email: dizney@up.edu. CourseSource | www.coursesource.org 2021 | Volume 08 1 Essay