Educating Online Students in Laboratory Safety

Understanding laboratory biosafety is essential for any student in biology courses. With the switch to remote instruction, it became imperative to continue to relay the importance of laboratory biosafety even for online, asynchronous science courses. Here, we present exercises used to teach students the importance of understanding, not just memorizing, laboratory biosafety guidelines, rules, protocols, and requirements. The incorporation of universal design for learning (UDL) principles allowed for multimodal approaches to incorporate content and attempt to provide a flexible, equitable, and engaging experience. Continuing to educate students on proper laboratory safety even in an online modality is especially critical for students that will eventually return to in-person laboratory courses where they will be expected to follow laboratory safety policies and procedures.