Abstract:

Blended learning is growing in popularity all over the world within higher education post-COVID-19 forming the cornerstone of the curriculum design and providing opportunity for learning, which were not previously possible or available to all students in Italy.

As it is well known, blended learning is an approach to education that combines online resources with traditional in person activities with the instructors/professors that often make some or all the content available to their students outside class-time (flipped classroom paradigm). A hybrid of in-person lessons and distance learning is one of the many proposed models for the upcoming future relating to the technologies-assisted classroom teaching activities concerning also the universities in Italy. There are many ways to blend face-to-face classroom time and online lessons. Blended teaching and learning will allow to reduce physical attendance in favor of video conferencing so as to create smaller groups and accordingly ensuring appropriate social distancing. Those activities will also allow to go back to frontal lessons as the prevalent way of teaching with the aid of certain technologies supporting the learning process. An important aspect of all blended-learning environment is that the students are not intended to do away with "face time" in the classroom because they count on face-to-face interaction between students and teacher unlike online classes. More than ever, laboratory activities will contribute towards enhancing Science learning and will be considered to be an essential component of its teaching, in both high school and at the undergraduate level.

Here I present a new approach, also suitable for a large laboratory course integrating blended teaching and flipped classroom paradigms which I have already tested on a small group of students that worked on their thesis under my supervision during the last three academic years. Such approach "learning to recognize problems, learning how to wrong and learning from mistakes to do a good job” will be extended, in the next academic year, to some second-year undergraduate biology students for their first exposure to molecular biology laboratory activities (Blended learning). During lab activity (2 months), once or twice a week for 2hr, students will carry out and complete the experiments, included plasmid DNA isolation, restriction digestion and mapping, in a hands-on approach, individually trying to apply the acquired knowledge.

Also, to increase engagement after doing the experiment the right way, students will be stimulated and left free to repeat the same experiment by designing and following a different experimental procedure, varying certain steps of the standard protocol and making certain mistakes in the experiment as resulted of their flipped classroom study of user's troubleshooting guide of commercial kits (Sigma-Aldrich).

In other words, the students first carry out the DNA plasmid purification according to a standard protocol with well-defined steps and an expected outcome and later the students repeat the same experiment "wrongly" with a variation in one or more steps in the standard protocol discussing experimental outcomes and analyzing the consequences of the variations.

The main challenge of moving from teacher-focused learning model to a student-focused learning model depends also on technical resources being affordable, reliable and easy-to-use for both the students and the teachers.

Keywords:

Inquiry‐based approach, new course development, molecular biology laboratory activities, problem-based learning.