CURE in Antibiotic Discovery Using a Combination of In-Person, Hands-On Laboratory Activities and Remote, Mentor-Type Experiences during COVID-19

Pedagogy designed to improve student engagement, like the course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), was given its hardest challenge yet during the COVID-19 pandemic: to find a way to exist and continue productive work in a remote environment. Faculty in STEM disciplines have worked to implement CURE programs into course curriculums, only to have had some of them disrupted during spring 2020. The demonstrated benefits of the CURE in improving student engagement and persistence in the sciences could be at risk if these courses continue to be disrupted. How do faculty make CUREs work when emergency remote learning continues to loom over our institutions? This teaching tip focuses on how one antibiotic discovery CURE used technology and individual meetings to continue the students’ experience and research process. The instructor remained alone in the laboratory with the student samples and acted as the students’ hands, in order to continue testing and characterizing samples collected earlier in the semester, while students watched and directed the process during the online meetings. The change in methodology helped to restore some of the individual and small group mentor-type activity provided in the principal investigator–student researcher relationship present in undergraduate research experiences that was lost with the development of CUREs and the move to remote learning.