Teaching Forensic Entomology, Forensic Anthropology, and Haematology & Serology during the COVID-19 pandemic: Practical activities for distance learning

As the COVID-19 pandemic upended college and university instruction throughout the world, instructors were hard-pressed to find suitable alternatives for practical activities typically carried out outside of classrooms—in laboratories, workshops, clinics, and in the field. In response to this unanticipated challenge, they relied on their ingenuity to achieve pre-pandemic goals under pandemic conditions that necessitated the shift to online teaching. The Forensic Science Undergraduate Program housed in the School of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico was not exempt from this educational upheaval but, due to its interdisciplinary nature, required creating and/or adopting a wide range of activities capable of training students to perform practical tasks associated with subject areas that span the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the law. This report aims to describe the approaches undertaken in three subjects (Forensic Entomology, Forensic Anthropology, and Hematology & Serology) by interviewing instructors and examining their teaching materials. Also, through online surveys, students’ reactions to these approaches were elicited to learn about their suitability and teaching potential. Instructor’s experiences during the pandemic have proven to be a rich source of ingenious solutions, with implications well-beyond the current crisis, such as creating blended or fully online courses aimed at larger numbers of students, forensic and legal professionals, and even other instructors. The wide variety of forensic sciences offers the opportunity to innovate and improve the teaching and learning of science, particularly to the benefit of students that must combine their school tasks with professional and/or family duties.