“Virtual Labs? Virtually Useless.“

When I first dreamed about coming to the University of Toronto and starting my university career, I pictured attending lectures in grand halls reminiscent of Hogwarts, exploring the city (A.K.A getting drunk) with my friends on the weekends, and performing experiments in state-of-the-art university labs. Nothing could have prepared me for completing my first two years of university at home through a laptop. 

While online lectures and tutorials have been (somewhat) manageable, virtual labs have been one of the biggest downsides of e-learning. As many students in the Life Sciences program can tell you, lab work is a significant component to completing your degree. In first year, you’re mainly brushing up on lab practices from high school and learning common research methods used today, like PCR amplification or fluorescence microscopy. In second year, however, you begin to narrow into your field of interest, perform more complex experiments, and have a little more input in designing your procedure. With the shift to virtual learning, however, the most hands-on lab experience students receive is by completing a computer simulation that’s more akin to a mobile game than anything of actual educational value. 

For those of you who are unaware (and may I say, I envy you for your ignorance), virtual labs typically consist of reading roughly 8-10 pages of a lab manual—potentially a research paper pertaining to the current experiment as well—completing a lab quiz, and watching a series of videos of a T.A. performing the actual experiment while narrating in a monotone voice that puts Severus Snape to shame. To top it all off, you then complete a lab report wherein the most thinking you have to do is identify breaches in lab safety. Of course, certain courses will also have students perform some minor calculations, or perform data computations on a pre-assigned data set, but generally, there tends to be an overall lack of inquiry-based or experiential learning. All in all, not exactly the experience that I was picturing when I thought about studying at U of T. 

While I understand that the current situation has forced professors to scramble to rework their syllabi and make do with what they can, it’s hard for students to not feel frustrated, as though they are not receiving the full educational value of performing these labs. In fact, when describing their virtual lab experience, one second-year student stated, “I felt like I had not learnt much about realistically how lab work was done in university, as we only did data analysis from given data sets […] it felt very manual, as if they [teaching assistants] were reading a script or checking through a checklist.” 

They’re not alone, as many other students noted feeling as though learning through virtual labs was insufficient. Another life sciences student described how virtual labs has impacted their overall study habits: “I definitely noticed a drop in my motivation to complete the lab modules because I took advantage of the fact that much of the content was pre-recorded […] it is an entirely different experience when you can physically feel laboratory glassware in your hands, pipette using a real pipette and not a virtual one […] though I am capable of learning lab content online by reading and watching videos, it is only once I can physically do something that I really start to have a more enriching learning experience.”

As many students noted, there is a vast difference between reading about performing procedures such as titrations and bacterial transformation, and actually physically performing them. Of all the students interviewed, not one individual reported feeling confident—nor competent—enough to perform a laboratory technique that they had learned during their virtual labs. Not only has the education of these students been compromised, but there is also the issue of lab safety—there is a large group of students who have not had any wet lab experience whatsoever in a university lab setting, and should we return to in-person labs, these individuals pose as a danger not only to themselves but to others in the lab as well. In an environment where you are handling fragile (not to mention expensive) equipment and working with potentially hazardous materials, the worst thing that you can do is have no idea as to what you are doing. 

Virtual labs have also impacted the future of many students’ university careers, as it has hindered their ability to get research experience. For many students in the life sciences, having research experience is a necessity, especially if they plan on attending graduate school or medical school, or obtaining a paid position at a lab. However, for those students who have only experienced university labs online, their lack of practical knowledge can leave them at a disadvantage. Most research positions—paid or otherwise—have previous lab experience as a prerequisite, and given that these positions are already highly competitive, the current situation has left many students feeling disadvantaged when compared to upper years, who have at least received 1-2 years worth of in-person labs. 

One student voiced how the competition for experience in professional labs has significantly increased since before the pandemic. Another expressed their frustrations at applying for summer internships, “…there are a lot of job postings that require some sort of lab experience, which I would have gotten had my courses been in person, but I can’t apply to them because I’m not confident working in a physical lab.” I, myself, can’t help but feel a combination of agitation and self-loathing upon seeing “previous experience working in a lab” under the posted requirements when applying for a research position, and I annoyingly think to myself, well I would have freaking lab experience had it not been for the pandemic and we were in person. 

Given the price of tuition and the experience that they have received with virtual labs, a vast majority of the students interviewed have complained about feeling cheated, with many calling for reduced tuition costs, or at the very least, access to some of the lab materials to complete their labs at home. As one student pointed out, “Tuition costs include lab fees, such as access to the laboratory itself, the materials, the experiments, which I never got to use or even see and still had to pay for it.” Another student stated, “I often have this lingering feeling in the back of my head that I am spending a lot of money, but I feel as though I am not getting as much learning done out of my degree by learning virtually.” With it being almost three years since I last stepped foot in a lab, I can’t help but feel as though virtual labs have been virtually useless. It feels as though all I have been doing in these online labs is mindlessly reading through experimental procedures without actually understanding what it is that I’m reading. As one student mentioned, I also noticed a significant decline in my motivation to complete the lab modules. At one point, I was only watching the experiments to identify the answers to the lab reports and receive a good grade—I wasn’t actively paying attention to what was occurring in the experiments, and in the end, all I did was devalue my own learning. With the university’s move towards in-person learning in February, I can only hope that in-person labs will attempt to compensate for the fact that some students have missed out on the vital experiential learning that comes with lab work.