This blog post was contributed by Theresa Umscheid, Executive Director of the Iowa Community Colleges Online Consortium.

The past year’s rapid shift to more online classrooms has challenged faculty to provide students with interactive learning experiences from a distance.  It’s one thing to provide remote and online learning for lecture style classes, but much more difficult to find content for interactive science labs.  It’s important for students to actually interact with lab activities and be able discuss results rather than just memorizing facts.  In my search to find free online science lab content I discovered LabXchange.

LabXchange is a free online science educational platform that was funded by the Amgen Foundation in partnership with Harvard University’s faculty of Arts and Sciences. It brings together videos, assessments and interactive simulations so you can provide unique and personalized virtual science lab experiments that engage students by bringing to life a wide range of science processes. Teachers can mix and match class materials to create flexible pathways for students that fit with their own course curriculum.

In addition to original labs contributed by peers online, popular open educational resources like the OpenStax Microbiology textbook also have labs available in the LabXchange library. Sort by Content Source to see labs from HarvardX, OpenStax, Khan Academy, and others! To see content contributed to LabXchange directly, filter your results to “Content Source — LabXchange.”

LabXchange is more than just a platform or digital content, it is actually a community for learning, sharing, and collaboration for educators and students. It enables teachers to network with others around the world.

Visit the website to learn more and check if there are any modules, videos, interactive labs, or other resources available that you might want to introduce into your classroom.