As a first-year teacher, Sarah Latchney was excited to introduce students to the complexity of the human brain through her BIOL 419: Neurobiology with Laboratory course. But when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, the St. Mary’s College of Maryland professor faced one tiny problem:
The lab was closed.
“All of a sudden I was stuck online and didn’t know what to do,” Latchney recalled.
Fast forward a semester, and hybrid learning was the norm. To accommodate both in-person and remote students, Latchney turned to open science tools from the Allen Institute. She used these resources to teach first-year biology students concepts like mitosis and incorporated a lesson plan on neuron morphology in her intro to neuroscience course.
“These resources can show students a lot about experimental design, about generating hypotheses, about coming up with predictions, about how to analyze data—even without ever picking up a pipette,” Latchney said.
When a student, Julia Milner, decided to study Alzheimer’s disease—a subject outside Latchney’s area of expertise—she knew where to turn.
