Video: Provost Burns describes lab classes for the fall

I’m Kate Burns, the interim provost and vice chancellor of Academic Affairs here at UW-Green Bay, and we are thinking about fall safety today.

In thinking about this, and how labs are going to work this fall, we are including a lot of safety measures. First everyone’s going to be wearing a mask. We are going to be using six-foot social distancing, so we have revised all of the capacities for our classroom and for our lab spaces to be able to account for that social distancing.

We are also including extra precautions in terms of the cleaning procedures. For a lab specifically there’s lots of specialized equipment, so both instructors and students will have the cleaning materials that they need to be able to clean those materials throughout the lab period so that they’ll be able to make sure that multiple people will be able to use those.

We’re also doing things a little bit more creatively, so for some things like microscopes we will be able to use videos of what is on the screen for that microscope, so that way we can ensure safety.

Some of the labs have to become hybrid so that they are in having some students in the lab on some days and then online, and then switching that out throughout the semester so that we can better account for that spacing within the lab environment.

Some labs are going to be asynchronous online, while some of them are going to be synchronous online. For synchronous courses, you would meet at the same time, but online with the instructor, so you’re having that lab from a distance. For asynchronous labs, you will just view at whatever time works best for your schedule for that online experience.

In both the sciences and the arts all the instructors are really looking at what are those cleaning protocols needed to be able to make sure that everyone can stay safe.