The culture of science education changes gradually or rapidly like other sociocultural phenomena. Although gradual change may explain much of the progress in science education culture, a particular event can also lead to a dramatic change that could not happen otherwise. The COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 and that swept the entire globe brought drastic changes to all educational contexts. According to UNESCO (2020), more than one billion students from more than 100 countries were affected by school closures. One of the most significant changes in education has been a shift toward non-face-to-face teaching and learning courses. This trend is also significant in the higher education context (Ali 2020), and institutions such as the OECD have been concerned about the long-term impact of remote-education formats (Reimers and Schleicher 2020). Researchers are now contemplating a post-pandemic “new normal” that is all but normal, especially in the area of science education where the necessity for supplementing hands-on science laboratory activities through online environments has raised new questions about how to approach science laboratory teaching and learning as we move forward. Laboratory courses have been one of the most important teaching and learning methods used in science education since the 1980s (Hofstein and Lunetta 2004), especially at the post-secondary level. Through general laboratory courses, university students can foster knowledge, skills, and attitudes for their future coursework and career (Domin 1999). However, implementing laboratory courses can be quite demanding. Instructors have to design the laboratory courses carefully, and students have to spend a long time in a fixed lab space during class time. In addition, resources such as separate lab space, apparatus, and reagents required in laboratory courses are costly for universities compared to lecture halls, and not all students can be provided with chances to experience them (Hofstein and Lunetta 2004). Instructors therefore need to utilize their agency to implement appropriate laboratory courses for each specific situation (Bell and Gilbert 1996).

Many researchers emphasize the need for actual bodily experiences with laboratory procedures so that laboratory courses have most often been developed using a hands-on format (Reid and Shah 2007). However, there have been doubts about laboratory courses’ effectiveness for learning, as they have been described by some researchers as superficial sensory operations (e.g., Abrahams and Millar 2008). As a result, “minds-on” laboratory courses have been suggested, particularly by constructivists. According to these groups, minds-on science (i.e., without physical operation) can help students learn more genuinely, guiding pupils to concentrate on theory-driven higher-order processes with peer interaction (Schamel and Ayres 1992). These two approaches have been controversial (e.g., Davis 1998), although they do not seem to be incompatible (Schamel and Ayres 1992), raising lasting questions about the role and value of laboratory courses in science education.

The development of educational technologies has brought about possible changes in university-level laboratory courses. Particularly in engineering education, much research exploring the minds-on approach has shown the plausibility of remote, virtual, or online laboratory courses even, before the pandemic (Tho, Yeung, Wei, Chan and So 2017). These studies are generally conducted in carefully designed situations. As a result, the influence of this research seems to have been quite limited as most university laboratory courses have remained unchanged for decades (Reid and Shah 2007). However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive responses required by governments forced many university-level laboratory courses to be implemented remotely—meaning students could not attend laboratory classes physically, and so they had to learn online. This caused vast confusion for university STEM instructors who tend to work in rigid structures to coordinate and implement various laboratory courses for all different content areas within very specific laboratory spaces and carefully fixed schedules. While there have been some reports about adaptive responses to the pandemic, such as a case study of remote laboratory courses described as successful even under pandemic conditions (e.g., Youssef, McKinstry, Dunne, Bitton, Brady and Jordan 2020), as far we know, no research has compared laboratory courses for different science disciplines being implemented simultaneously during the pandemic at the same university.

In this study, we investigated how STEM instructors in a large university in Korea designed, developed, and implemented various remote laboratory courses during the COVID-19 pandemic during the 2020 school year. We interpreted the sociocultural aspects of these phenomena, to identify how multi-level structures shaped instructors’ agency. Revealing what happened in a Korean university can help inform science educators around the world as they navigate through an uncertain post-COVID-19 paradigm of science education.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its global influence on science education

Although the educational cataclysm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is unparalleled in modern history, it has also resulted in the spread of online non-face-to-face teaching and learning using internet and communication technology (ICT) (UNESCO 2020) from kindergarten to university levels and in all areas, including science (Reimers and Schleicher 2020). Soon after the beginning of the pandemic, articles began to appear that investigated the influence of the pandemic on science education. Editorials appeared in science education journals urging researchers to engage in research to understand the impact on usual science teaching (e.g., Siry 2020; Martin 2020a) and describing how improved research and instruction were needed in the areas of history, philosophy, and sociology of science help to overcome the fear of the public who were being bombarded with false information about mask-wearing and unsafe vaccination (e.g., Erduran 2021). While there have been some case studies from secondary schools detailing changes to science teaching and learning (e.g., Levrini, Fantini, Barelli, Branchetti, Satanassi and Tasquie 2021; Kang and Seo 2021), most have simply reported about the shift from face-to-face to non-face-to-face science teaching (e.g., Jang, Choi and Hong 2020). More empirical research is needed to enhance our understanding of science education during the COVID-19 era (Erduran 2021). To broaden the view of how science educators have struggled during the pandemic in different regional contexts, we offer an investigation of university laboratory course instructors in Korea.

From disruption to recovery during COVID-19: International responses by science educators in formal and informal settings

This study was conducted as a part of an international joint research project seeking to share how COVID-19 disrupted education in local contexts and to describe how the pandemic has specifically impacted science teaching and learning (Martin 2020b). Research team members from Korea (East Asia), U.S., Canada, Mexico (North America), and Luxembourg, Germany, and Portugal (Europe) participated in the project. Researchers studied different topics in various science education contexts, including formal education, such as elementary school and university, and informal education, such as science museums (Martin 2021). Since June 2020, the researchers have simultaneously investigated different settings in their local contexts and have come together for three consecutive online two-day symposiums (Martin 2020b). During the symposiums, researchers briefed each other, discussed research design, data collection and analysis, and discussed findings and implications. This process allowed insights from multiple perspectives from around the world and has contributed to the development of this research. In the sections that follow, we focus on describing one of the studies from this larger project related to the emergency implementation of remote laboratories for students at a large university in South Korea.

Sociocultural perspective and instructor agency

In this study, we draw from William Sewell’s (1992) sociocultural perspective about structure and agency to examine the phenomena of teaching science using remote laboratories. Structure consists of rules (schema) and resources, which exist in a dialectic relationship that mutually serve to produce and reproduce the other (Sewell 1992, 1999). Because structure and agency exist in a dialectical relationship, the structures associated with the enactment of remote laboratory courses can be seen as both affording and constraining instructors’ agency as they enact practices associated with teaching science laboratories remotely. When implementing the remote laboratory courses, the instructors can contribute to the (re)production of normative laboratory course structures (schema and resources) and they can also contribute to the transformation of normative structures by enacting new or different schema and by accessing and appropriating resources in new or different ways. The pandemic, by necessity, provided instructors an opportunity to approach science laboratory courses from a new perspective in the online, remote teaching and learning context. This research explores what practices were afforded and constrained in this new field of online, remote science laboratory teaching and seeks to identify what schema and resources supported and/or limited instructors and students from teaching and learning science laboratory knowledge and practical skills in this context.

The relationship between structure and teacher (instructor) agency is considered necessary in science education (Bell and Gilbert 1996), in that science teachers should have some responsibility and agency in the process of educational change. However, it has been noted that teachers generally have only limited agency within the context of their teaching environments as many structures beyond the classroom inform and shape their teaching practices (Bell and Gilbert 1996). Several studies have interpreted the field of science education in the Korean context from a sociocultural perspective. For example, Park, Martin and Chu (2015) examined how structures shaped teacher and student agency while implementing science classes in a government-designated innovative middle school. Drawing from Bourdieu’s (1986, 1992) suggestion of nested fields, Park, Martin and Chu’s (2015) seminal work suggested a multi-level (i.e., macro-, meso-, and micro- levels) understanding of teacher and student agency in the Korean science classroom. In their study, curriculum reforms, exam systems, and private education were identified as components of macro-level structures; family, the school, private education institutes, and peers were considered components of meso-level structures; and the individual schema of students and teachers and the resources within individual science classrooms were identified as components of micro-level structures. Analysis of the dialectical relationship of structure and agency within and across different levels allows researchers to better reveal and discuss the ways in which schema and resources from one field may shape or inform schema and practices in another field.

Similarly, Lim, Kim and Kim (2021) explored the challenges a Korean elementary teacher faced while implementing a social action-oriented socio-scientific issues curriculum using the dialectical relationship of multi-level structures and agency. In Lim, Kim and Kim (2021) study, a teacher-agency model (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson2015) was used to describe teacher agency in a diachronic sense, with teacher agency being understood in the iterational, practical-evaluative, and projective dimensions. From this perspective, teacher agency is shaped by the teachers’ past professional/personal experience; present cultural, material, and structural aspects; as well as their long- and short-term aspirations for future practice.

In this work, we understand the COVID-19 pandemic and related prevention and control responses of the world’s governments as an overarching structure that imposed restrictions and obligations on institutions and people in every aspect of their lives. In Korea, for example, governmental structures requiring school closure and social distancing measures in schools and universities, shaped the agency of instructors and students in the context of science teaching and learning. Considering the unavoidable influence of the pandemic and the limited agency of individuals in this situation, we sought to examine and understand how these structures at the macro-level context (Korean society and government) and meso-level contexts (university administration) impacted on instructor agency at the micro-level contexts (individual remote laboratory courses). In an attempt to understand important factors for affecting change in how university science laboratories are enacted during and after the pandemic, a goal for this investigation was to identify those structures that resist change and those that are more malleable. To do this, we interviewed instructors about the remote laboratory courses they developed to understand how they perceived the laboratory courses with regards to their purpose, effectiveness, and impact on students’ science learning. Drawing from Priestley, Biesta and Robinson (2015) work, we examined instructors’ responses to enable us to delineate the practical-evaluative and projective dimensions of their agency while responding to the crisis.

Research questions

Based on the above considerations, we aimed to interpret the remote laboratory course phenomena from a sociocultural and teacher agency perspective, while descriptively reporting the Korean university remote laboratory courses. Our inquiry was framed by three research questions:

  1. 1.

    What structures at the macro- (Korea), meso- (Hankuk University), and micro- (each course) levels afforded or limited instructors’ agency while implementing remote laboratory courses?

  2. 2.

    How did instructors at Hankuk University implement remote laboratory courses in 2020 during the COVID-19 emergency? Were there any differences in the implementation of remote laboratory courses dependent upon discipline?

  3. 3.

    How did instructors at Hankuk University perceive the implemented remote laboratory courses, and what suggestions did they make for implementing remote laboratory courses in the future?

Understanding the research field of Hankuk University in Korea

We conducted this research at Hankuk University (a pseudonym) in Korea—and this makes our research field unique. As with many East Asian countries, Korea has a governmental system that is more centralized than many Western countries. After liberation from the Japanese Empire in 1945, an authoritarian government was in place for decades until 1993. Although Korea has been a democratized country for more than 30 years, the power of the centralized government and public administration still remains. This is reflected not only by the prescriptive national K-12 curriculum, but also in that policy, administrative, and fiscal authority regarding education are all centralized and controlled by the Korean Ministry of Education (KMOE). For example, the KMOE executes a budget that supports universities throughout the country, and these budgets can be cut when a university does not follow the directives of the KMOE and/or fails to satisfy evaluation criteria. As many universities largely depend on this financial support, the KMOE has a large influence over university decision-making. Therefore, it is necessary to consider how educational authorities responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with regard to directives given to schools and universities which forced them to implement adaptive online classes.

Korea’s success in limiting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to the centralized administrative system and people’s adherence to public health guidelines and possibly to the Korean people’s fairly uniform levels of scientific literacy about issues in their daily lives. Although there were hundreds of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Korea at the start of 2020, the daily rate of infection remained between 1500 and 3000 per day until November 2021, which was very low compared to other countries with equivalent populations (KOSIS 2021). Additionally, unlike in some other countries, there have been essentially no reports of protest or debate about mandating the wearing of masks to prevent the spreading of the virus. Even now, in January 2023, the law still requires people to wear masks indoors and public transportation. In May 2022, masks were no longer required outdoors, but the vast majority of people still wear masks both indoors and out.

In general, Korean people have been receptive to an authoritative approach to responding to crisis situations. Korean people refer to this proclivity as “correct-answer society” (정답 사회; jeongdap sahoe), which implies that society only allows the “correct answer” to be spoken in public, and other alternatives are rejected. This culture is produced and reproduced in the centralized Korean school system, which only emphasizes correct answers on assessments (see Choi 2009). Although this may help structuralize and consolidate society, it also may limit individuals in utilizing their agency. This could account for why all instructors at Hankuk University chose to follow the administrative decision to implement remote laboratory courses for all science classes to help prevent the spread of the virus.

Hankuk University consists of 13 different colleges that each have many different departments, including STEM, arts, social sciences, and humanities. Each year, about half of the 3,000 first-year students enroll in a general physics, chemistry, biology, and/or earth science course and laboratory course attendance is mandatory. Unlike studies published in other countries which have documented large drop-out rates from introductory science courses (Xu 2014; NCES 2014), at Hankuk University very few students drop their courses or even fail to graduate from the university. Because hands-on science has not been a focus for the Korean national curriculum, most students have had few chances to conduct laboratory activities during their K-12 education. So for most students, the laboratory courses required to fulfill general science requirements are the first opportunity to engage in a practical experimental course.

In this research, the term instructor refers to both faculty members and the graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) who work jointly to develop, implement, and evaluate all introductory and major level university science laboratory courses. Because almost half of all first-year students are required to enroll in a general laboratory course, Hankuk University has developed a general laboratory course system in which physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science all share similar instructional systems. With the exception of earth science, all laboratory courses are taught in content specific laboratory spaces where students can have hands-on experiences.

All laboratory courses are held at least once per week for three hours and they are all are managed and instructed by TAs. There is one TA in Chief (TAC) for the physics, chemistry, and biology labs, respectively. The TAC represents and manages dozens of TAs in each discipline area. Usually, the TAC communicates with the faculty of each department to decide on the course schedule, to allocate TAs to each classroom, and to procure materials. For the physics, chemistry, and biology labs, faculty members have the most agency and responsibility in that they closely oversee the activities of the TAC, who in turn, manages the TAs. In the case of earth science lab there were two TAs, but no TAC. Here, the TAs communicated directly with faculty members, who had final decision-making authority. As described later, each lab course TA usually inherits extensive documentation describing in detail the course design, including experiments to be conducted and assignments to be completed.

Usually, the laboratory experiments are quite expositional (Domin 1999), meaning the outcome is predetermined and uses a traditional deductive approach where a sequential procedure and all materials are provided for the student. After completing the prescribed experiment each week, students must write and submit a lab report. In the following week, the students receive feedback and a final score for the report from the TA. After their first year in the university, some students continue to become STEM field majors and they will take many additional laboratory courses related to their major.

The TAs are essential for managing and operating each department’s laboratory course. Each department recruits graduate students in that department to be employed as a TA for a particular section of the course, for which they will be solely responsible. For example, one TA may instruct all students about acid–base reactions for each section of the same laboratory course, but will not teach any laboratory sessions. In this way, each department ensures all first-year students are uniformly instructed in each course. Hankuk University is one of Korea’s most prominent and competent universities, so the ability of instructors and students is quite high.

Method

Participants

In the spring semester of 2020, a total of 89 TAs were employed to oversee all laboratory courses. This included 29 in physics, 18 in chemistry, 40 in biology, and two in earth science. In addition, seven TAs taught courses for the two upper level science major courses. For this research, we interviewed 10 people from Hankuk University who took charge of remote laboratory course implementation in the 2020 academic school year. We recruited the participants via e-mail and snowball sampling with institutional IRB approval. Participants included one TAC from physics, two TAs from chemistry, two lecture professors and one TAC from biology, two TAs from earth science, and two TAs in the major science courses. Detailed information about participants is presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Participants who engaged in the remote laboratory courses in 2020
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Qualitative interviews

Qualitative interviews were conducted from November 2020 to March 2021. We interviewed most participants individually (except LP_BioLab1–2), with semi-structured questions. Interview questions included information about the remote laboratory course instructional system, decision-making processes, endeavors, and perceptions of remote laboratory course implementation in 2020 (Table 2). The interviews took about 50 min each. Considering the pandemic situation, six of the ten participants were interviewed via Zoom, and the other four were interviewed face-to-face abiding by the Korean government’s public health and safety rules. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed.

Table 2 Examples of the questions in the semi-structured interviews
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Data analysis

While analyzing the transcribed interview data, we used the constant comparative method (Glaser 1965). We initially coded the transcripts and constantly compared the codes with the data to revise the codes several times. Here, we kept in mind the framework of the macro-, meso-, and micro- level structures (Bourdieu 1986, 1992) that afforded and limited instructors while implementing remote laboratory courses (see Park, Martin and Chu 2015). Each level needed a somewhat different emphasis in the Korean context. We had to refer to broader social contexts and literature for the macro-level structure. For the meso-level structure, we had to refer to the previous documented practices of laboratory courses and participant interview data. Finally, for the micro-level structure, we depended mostly on interview data. During our analysis, we focused on the practical-evaluative aspect described in the teacher-agency model (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson 2015), because instructors had no prior experience teaching the laboratory courses online. We also contemplated the projective aspects of instructors’ agency for implementing remote laboratory courses in the future. As these data were collected overs a two semesters period, for some interviews, we were able to draw on instructors’ prior semester experiences which gave some opportunities to reflect on past/present/future experiences.

We requested that interview participants provide documents related to their remote laboratory courses, such as syllabuses and/or course plans. In addition, we conducted this research in step with a study that examined university students’ perception of the remote laboratory courses implemented at Hankuk University in 2020. In this related study, students participated in an online survey and follow-up interviews (Lee, Kang, Kim, Hong and Martin in press). While we will not report extensively on this parallel study in this paper, we did consider the information gathered from students to help triangulate our analysis of the interview data with the course instructors. Researchers established inter-rater reliability for coding and analyzing interview data and we engaged in continuous, systemic discussions and reflections about the research design and analysis with researchers in the larger international project and with the research team in Korea to improve the credibility and trustworthiness of our interpretations of the data.

Results

The structural elements that shaped the implementation of the remote laboratory courses at Hankuk University in the 2020 academic school year are visualized at three levels, macro, meso, and micro, in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Structural elements that shaped remote laboratory courses at Hankuk University in the 2020 academic school year

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Macro-level context: South Korea

Centralized governmental power and educational enactment

As universities in Korea cannot avoid being dependent on the KMOE, they had to wait for and follow the decision of the Ministry concerning how to conduct the nation’s education system during the pandemic. In Korea, K-12 schools and universities start the first day of the school year in the spring semester, usually the first week of March. However, this was not the case in 2020 as the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Korea was reported on January 20. The virus spread quickly in Korea, and the initial response from the KMOE about how schools should respond during the pandemic was understandably delayed. By February 5, the KMOE had recommended that universities postpone the start of the semester for four weeks. Moreover, the KMOE specified that all university courses would need to be implemented using a non-face-to-face format.

As a result, most universities in Korea had to make difficult decisions and consequently started the semester in the third week of March, and all courses had to be taught in a non-face-to-face format. Although the KMOE allowed some face-to-face classes in practical courses in May 2020 (ex. nursing or medical fields), the KMOE inspected whether the universities were abiding by preventive guidelines, and most universities retained the non-face-to-face format until the end of the semester in June 2020. For the timeline described here, we referred to the news articles from University News Network (2020a, 2020b).

These preventive and regulative responses of the government and education authority were a macro-level structure that impacted the meso-level structure of Hankuk University. The administrators and instructors had to wait until they received information to make any decisions, which was an indirect, but major influence on the agency of laboratory course instructors as they had no idea about what or how to prepare until being informed by the government.

Korea’s internet and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure

Korea is well known for its high-quality ICT infrastructure. More than 95% of the population (approximately 45 million people) have access to high-speed internet. This helped the country respond more successfully to the COVID-19 pandemic than some other countries (see Park, Choi and Ko 2020). In education in particular, many high school students in Korea were already accustomed to attending online lectures as a form of private education, which most students receive in addition to their formal school lessons (see Shin and Jang 2011). Therefore, when the whole education system had to shift to non-face-to-face education via the internet, instructors and students were more easily able to make this transition than people in countries where this practice was not the norm. No instructor who participated in this study mentioned any problems to access the internet while implementing remote laboratory courses. Instead, the ICT structure of Korea was often praised and appreciated for enabling the implementation of smooth online courses.

I thought the course ran well compared to what I expected. ... anyway, observing various educational response methods [around the world], I felt ‘Oh, our country is an IT powerhouse.’ (TA_EarthLab2)

And as described later, this ICT infrastructure was closely related to the use of various online education platforms in the micro-level context that afforded and/or limited instructors’ design and implementation of remote laboratory courses.

Meso-level context: Hankuk University and previous practices in laboratory courses

Hankuk University as a national university

As Hankuk University is a nationally funded university, the government’s requirements must be followed even more so than at private universities. This was especially true regarding the need to abide by public safety rules concerning COVID-19. Hankuk University has a somewhat rigid administrative atmosphere, meaning once the university administration decides something, all the departments and instructors must follow. This meso-level structure seriously impacted on the implementation of remote laboratory courses. As the university administration decided that laboratory courses also should be non-face-to-face, instructors needed to prepare for this unprecedented requirement:

Consequently, the guidelines of our [physics] department were determined according to the direction of the main office. (TAC_PhysLab1)

There was only a unidirectional notification last year [2020]. (TA_MajorLab2)

Therefore, only after the announcement from the administration could the instructors start to utilize their agency to even prepare for the implementation of remote laboratory courses:

We just followed … the direction of the university and department. [After that] we could handle the details under our authority. (LP_BioLab1)

The announcement was delivered from the university that lab courses would be taught as non-face-to-face … As I fully do [take charge of] experiments, I decided [how to respond] … (TA_EarthLab1)

The conventional system of massive general laboratory courses

As mentioned above, about 1,500 first-year students at Hankuk University take general laboratory courses annually. Therefore, relevant departments have developed a conventional system to implement massive courses in the university that has been used for decades. Many aspects of this system were retained and worked as a structure that informed the instructors’ decisions about the general laboratory courses:

The teacher [TA in the department] has the accumulated know-how in the case of chemistry lab. (TA_ChemLab2)

What existed previously [i.e., the curricula] has been around for more than 20 years. We have been changing that gradually, not abruptly. (LP_BioLab2)

Consequently, instructors rarely pointed out the lack of resources in the implementation of remote laboratory courses. This was because Hankuk University already had many resources to run massive laboratory courses in the conventional system, including the TA labor force and necessary laboratory apparatus. Therefore, instructors at Hankuk University were able to utilize any resources they needed to implement remote laboratory courses, with the exception of the laboratory classroom, which they did not need. Three TAs who instructed major-level remote laboratory courses in the College of Education, felt they had more flexibility compared to TAs in the general courses offered in the College of Natural Sciences. Courses offered in the natural sciences tended to have larger student enrollments. TAs who managed courses with smaller student enrollments felt they had more autonomy in decision making.

Micro-level context: remote laboratory courses according to science discipline

The micro-level structural elements were closely intersected, and from there, specific issues in the teaching and learning of remote laboratory courses arose during implementation. In explicating the micro-level structural elements, we seek to reveal the related problems. The micro-level structural elements are delineated in more detail in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Micro-level structural elements in detail and issues raised in intersections

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Instructors’ beliefs about the proper approach to science inquiry

Due to the pandemic, instructors had a chance to reflect more deeply about their own beliefs about desirable methods of teaching and learning of laboratory courses. Although the instructors did not use the exact term “inquiry” (as most of them were not science education researchers), they believed that scientific inquiry should be a hands-on experience. They also felt that students should follow experimental procedures, yield their own data firsthand, and then interpret their own findings. Therefore, when instructors at Hankuk University had to implement remote laboratory courses, they felt a disconnect between their beliefs about good teaching and what was required in the newly emerging remote learning environments.

[The physics laboratory is] a process that students embody ... the scientific knowledge they had learn in the theory classes coming to laboratory and using apparatuses ... [Even after the decision from the university headquarter], most [TAs] thought that ‘isn’t at least the laboratory course should go face-to-face?’ (TAC_PhysLab1)

Similar to other research in which chemistry instructors expressed dissatisfaction with remote lab courses (e.g., Youssef, McKinstry, Dunne, Bitton, Brady and Jordan 2020; Jones, Shepler and Evans 2021; Jang, Choi and Hong 2020), instructors found it was difficult to flexibly respond to the mandated online course format:

If we look inside weekly chemistry experiment topics such as the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, separation of components using HPLC, … these things are impossible to do in the non-face-to-face format without experiment. … Eventually, chemistry involves mixing reagents, increasing temperature, and boiling. It is nonsense to run an experiment course without experiments. (TA_ChemLab1)

Nature of each science discipline

The implementation of remote laboratory courses was related to the perceived nature of each science discipline; in other words, not only administrative rationale but also the structure of knowledge for each discipline shaped the agency of each instructor. This was most apparent in the earth science courses as, unlike the other science courses, the earth science TAs simply instructed students via a real-time lecture using Zoom. TAs in the earth science courses said it was natural to lecture without using hands-on activities as this was their normal practice even before the pandemic:

[In earth science lab] There is almost no experiment that puts models or reagents [in front of the student] as is done in chemistry or biology. … As I said before, it is data interpretation. … In that aspect, if each [student] should do it themselves, I think there would be no significant difference between face-to-face and non-face-to-face. (TA_EarthLab1)

Our earth science lab curriculum has always been run by just setting assignments and having students doing them. Physics and chemistry [labs] do actual operating [hands-on] experiments. So [I] thought physics, chemistry, biology [remote laboratory courses] would be very burdensome, but earth science would not be affected much [in the non-face-to-face format].… For example, earth science lab experiments mostly involve running simulations or animations, which are available at home alone. (TA_EarthLab2)

Meanwhile, in biology, both the introductory biology course and laboratory course for biology majors had modularized laboratory lessons curricula even though the departments were different. This was unique among the other disciplines. This provided instructors flexibility in implementing remote laboratory courses during the pandemic:

Previously there were four modules; they were reduced to three, and the lab reports were also reduced from one [report] per experiment to one [report] per module. (LP_BioLab1)

In the last year [2020], Part 1 was entirely online. Part 2 was half-online and half-offline. Part 3 was offline but was shortened. (TA_MajorLab2)

Affordances of online education platforms

From the first semester of 2020, in addition to the normal use of email, instructors could now utilize various online education platforms. The conventional learning management system (LMS) of Hankuk University named “eTL (e- Teaching and Learning),” provided online blackboards for announcements, course material sharing, homework (mostly lab report) submission and scoring, and Q&A boards. While it was not used uniformly by instructors and students before the pandemic, almost all instructors and students reported they relied heavily on the LMS during the pandemic. Some courses such as the physics laboratory course even used additional programs integrated into the LMS, such as Turnitin (www.turnitin.com), which is a program that checks for plagiarism and enables online feedback.

During the pandemic, Hankuk University provided all the instructors and students a Zoom account for holding unlimited online sessions to support non-face-to-face online education. As a result, Zoom emerged as most prominent online platform for managing real-time class sessions. In addition, as both Zoom and the LMS could both be access via computer or mobile smart devices, students and faculty were able to overcome many time and space constraints that were associated with teaching and learning before the pandemic. This includes needing to coordinate use of lab space which limited the number of course sessions that could be opened and the numbers of students who could be enrolled. In addition, with this new technology, instructors were able to open several small-group break-out sessions in Zoom to facilitate small-group activities and discussions. This was not a regular practice in the laboratory courses prior to the pandemic.

Remote laboratory courses implemented in the first semester 2020

Instructors at Hankuk University designed and implemented their own remote laboratory courses utilizing their own agency that was simultaneously shaped by both macro- and meso-level structural elements. Here, we compare the individual remote laboratory courses for each content discipline implemented during the first semester of 2020. Shown in Table 3, there were various commonalities and differences.

Table 3 Types of remote laboratory courses by science discipline offered in the first semester of 2020
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Commonalities

Just as the laboratory courses all had similar formats before COVID-19, during the pandemic, the remote laboratory courses continued to share several commonalities. All courses were taught as one session per week, but because the semester started late, the instructors were forced to reduce the total number of sessions usually taught. They all followed the sequence of introducing particular scientific theories to students, showing experimental procedures, and requiring students to write periodic laboratory reports. They provided students with videos as learning materials (with the exception of earth science), and due to worries about how to detect cheating, no course implemented the typical practice of giving laboratory quizzes before experimentation to assess student learning. All the remote laboratory courses required reports in an electronic format, which was the first time for physics and chemistry where students traditionally prepared reports in a hand-written laboratory notebook. Finally, all courses encouraged students with questions to contact the TA via e-mail or the LMS. While this practice was possible before the pandemic, it was not generally encouraged as instructors and students would have engaged in dialogue in class or during office hours.

Differences

There were several interesting differences in the ways instructors approached the remote laboratory courses. For example, only physics and biology courses recorded and edited new content as experimental videos for students to view. The TAs in these courses conducted experiments to record and produce experimental raw data, which was essential for students to use when writing their reports. The chemistry courses, however, chose to share videos of experiments that were recorded more than 10 years previously and they did not provide students with any experimental data. And, as reported previously, the earth science TAs did not record any video material, but instead the TAs instructed students via real-time Zoom classes using lecture slides and data accessible in online repositories. None of the other laboratory courses offered real-time Zoom sessions for lecture.

Requirements for course attendance and participation were also different. The physics and earth science courses required that students be present synchronously via zoom or by accessing content in the LMS during the specific time periods when the course session was scheduled. Alternatively, in the chemistry and biology courses, video material was uploaded to the LMS and students were able to access the videos asynchronously. In the physics courses, the TAs played experimental videos while the students were online in Zoom class and they all watched them together. After watching the videos, the TAs and students had Q&A sessions. This differed from the earth science courses where the focus of the Zoom sessions was on how to download data from repositories to be able to conduct experimental analysis, but not for viewing actual experiments.

With regard to the preparation of laboratory reports, physics, chemistry and earth science continued to require all students prepared one report per weekly laboratory experiment. The biology course covered three modules of nine experiments during the semester and instead of requiring one report per experiment, students were required to prepare one report per module. Requirements for the lab reports were also different. The physics course provided some general guidelines for writing, but did not mandate students to follow more prescribed format used previously. In addition, the physics TAs noted that students were not required to provide detailed references for citations as students had less access to reference materials. This practice was in contrast for the biology courses where TAs emphasized the references as being the most crucial part of the report. For the chemistry course reports, students were not required to provide a results section in their report as they had not been provided any experimental raw data. Instead, students were required to complete problem sets focused on theoretical problem-solving. Finally, for the earth science courses, oral discussion was sometimes required via the Zoom sessions, students were asked to complete lab reports from theoretical data supplied by repositories, and occasionally students were asked to solve advanced problem sets.

Issues raised during the implementation of remote laboratory courses

Video materials cannot substitute hands-on experience

In the remote laboratory courses implemented in the first semester of 2020, students could not access actual hands-on experiments. In this situation, some instructors recorded and edited video materials that presented experimental procedures (physics and biology), some used pre-recorded, unedited videos (chemistry), and others used experimental data sources for analysis and interpretation (earth science). Instructors had differing opinions about the strategies to be used and the effectiveness using video instead of engaging in hands-on laboratory activities, but most agreed that video was the only solution.

In the department meeting, … there was an opinion that if going online cannot be avoided, if that way is the only possible, then we all consented that we must record new videos and distribute them [to students]. (TAC_PhysLab1)

[About hands-on labs] we cannot think of other ways [than video]. (TA_MajorLab1)

While instructors believed videos could not fully replace the hands-on experiences remarkably, no instructors reported that it was unavoidably problematic for students’ learning to not actually experience first-hand manipulation of apparatus and equipment. In an attempt to make the experience more “first-person” some instructors attempted to incorporate descriptions of sensory experiences into the video recordings:

Actually, we had already had experience to record videos before the non-face-to-face [situation]. … That experience reinforced [our belief] we can do it for now [2020], but we decided to include captions and music to make better videos for each module. (LP_BioLab2)

To facilitate students’ observation, we zoomed in as much as possible using a microscope. While recording using a microscope, for example, we shot from various angles such as left, right, front to make it similar to how students actually use and look [at specimens] inside a microscope. (TA_MajorLab2)

Data that fit theory too well

Interestingly, instructors were most concerned about how to generate appropriate experimental data for students to work with since students could not generate their own. Because the TAs conducted the preliminary experiments and collected the data for use in the remote laboratory sessions instead of the students, the data produced fit the related theories too well, meaning there were no significant errors in the recorded data. As a result, students had nothing to discuss when writing their reports. The TAs worried that this would negatively impact on what students can learn from participating in this inquiry process:

While writing reports … comparing and analyzing the experimental data and checking how well or whether it matches theory - I think this is most important. … [However, in 2020], it just became writing a report with the data TAs collected. It became that kind of class. (TAC_PhysLab1)

[Before the pandemic] the discussion [section] of the report, while preparing experimental data, students had [their own] data regardless of how well they had conducted the experiment. [However, now] the data is not theirs and we prepare those virtual data [in some cases]. But what is important is data analysis after students finish the experiment. Now we [have to] instruct how to analyze [the data]. (LP_BioLab1)

I think contemplating why [the result is] spoiled is most important in the undergrad laboratory course. … [Because I conducted the experiment,] students could only receive theoretical, correct experimental results that do not deviate from theory. This is far from the purpose of the undergrad laboratory course. (TA_MajorLab1)

Limited interactions among instructors and students

Most of the instructors reported there was a lot of difficulty when interacting with students. This was significant in chemistry and biology courses, where there were no synchronous encounters of TAs and students online in the first semester of 2020. Instructors particularly mentioned the difference from the non-verbal interactions they normally had during face-to-face instruction that allowed them to know whether students were understanding the concepts, but this was not as easy to perceive in the remote laboratory courses.

I felt last time [pre-pandemic courses] that positive rapport is very important in trust-building. … I thought the non-face-to-face [online format] has limitations in that respect. (LP_BioLab2)

[Online] there was no interaction between teacher and students at all. Even if I make the same explanation, in face-to-face I can see [students’] eyes and gestures, and [students] see where I point to on the slide, and it facilitates interaction and understanding. However, as we did it in non-face-to-face, that was not possible. (TA_EarthLab1)

In the first semester of the pandemic, many students and even instructors did not have access to cameras for their computers, so people did not turn on their cameras during the Zoom instructional sessions. For instructors who primarily used the LMS for asynchronous activities, they were limited only to making general course announcements, sharing course materials, and reviewing lab report submissions. The LMS structure offered even less support than Zoom for facilitating interactions among instructors and students. In addition, these instructors felt that not only had interaction between students and instructors decreased, but the interactions among peers was significantly decreased compared to the pre-pandemic laboratory courses.

Difficulty of evaluating student lab reports

During the remote laboratory courses for physics, biology and earth science, all students in each section had access to the same data. Further, in the case of the chemistry courses, no data were provided for students at all. As a result, instructors found it difficult to evaluate what students had learned when grading their laboratory reports:

The differences in scores [among all students] certainly decreased a great deal. Unlike before, nobody ruined their experimental results with procedural errors, so [all students] wrote reports that had the same experimental results. (TA_MajorLab1)

At Hankuk University, grading for undergraduate courses is conducted on the curve so that there must be some distinction between students’ overall grades even when only small differences exist in their actual grades. This means students with only a few differences in the actual points in their numerical grade may receive a different letter grade. For example, a student with a grade of 95 and 94 may receive a letter grade of A and B, respectively. As the data provided by TAs were virtually error free, there was less difference in students’ grades. To address this issue, the TAs had to devise new ways to differentiate student grades. Examples included implementing quizzes in the lab report or requiring student presentations:

After the experiment is done, the students submit a report, but it’s like just writing an introduction to the topic. I also had to give [them] quizzes. I gave quizzes because I was concerned that there’s nothing to evaluate [or make distinctions]. Because writing up the procedures, data, discussion, and conclusions after experiments are all done is so simple. (TA_ChemLab1)

We thought it would be good to foster [oral] presentation skills. … so students needed to make a presentation of about 5–10 minutes. … these accounted for a large part of their grades … (LP_BioLab2)

Universities in Korea, including Hankuk University, reported that students received higher overall grades in the 2020 academic school year compared to previous years. This was due, in part to the inability to conduct more rigorous assessments in the online environment, and also to account for students’ constrained learning experiences and in appreciation for the general challenges students faced to adapt to totally new teaching methods and learner expectations.

University instructors’ perceptions of the learning outcomes of remote laboratory courses

Instructors perceived that the learning outcomes of remote laboratory courses differed from those of regular laboratory courses in several ways (Fig. 3). With regard to knowledge, most instructors (8 out of 10) reported that they believed that students could gain a sufficient amount of knowledge after taking the remote laboratory courses compared to the usual laboratory courses. Regarding skills, some instructors felt that students may have gained data processing or lab report writing skills similarly to students in pre-pandemic laboratory courses, but most instructors (6 out of 10) believed that by lacking hands-on experiments, students may not be able to effectively hone their laboratory skills. Finally, instructors’ responses about the impact of remote laboratory courses on students’ attitudes about science varied the most. This outcome was likely informed by many instructors’ inability to observe students’ attitudes via the synchronous and asynchronous activities conducted in each discipline area.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Instructors’ perceptions of students’ learning outcomes in from remote laboratory courses in 2020 academic school year (N = 10)

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Instructors were concerned about the quality of teaching and learning in remote laboratory courses, including whether students could “gain” much from the courses because they “did not actually do” the experiments (see Reid and Shah 2007). They worried about the lack of authentic-observation and hands-on learning experiences that normally occur in laboratory courses:

I still doubt that students can gain much in non-face-to-face laboratory courses. … Although they watch videos showing how the experimental results are collected, there will be a gap or differences [in understanding] from actually doing. (TAC_PhysLab1)

I agonized about how students could feel this [laboratory activities] even indirectly. However, when we see this from the third-person viewpoint, what the student gains … it cannot advantageous [for them]. (TA_ChemLab1)

University instructors’ adaptations and suggestions for future remote laboratory courses

After the first semester of 2020, university instructors adapted to online courses and revised their courses for the next semester, showing evidence of greater teacher agency than in the first semester as they could make changes by reflecting on their prior experiences. Even though instructors in all courses reported they were unaware of how other departments were implementing remote laboratory courses and they did not communicate with one another, during the second semester of 2020, the physics, chemistry, and biology labs became even more similar to one another. While the TAs for the physics courses made only small changes (e.g., changing due dates for assignments), the TAs in the chemistry and biology courses revised their approach more substantially. For example, in the second semester, TAs for the chemistry courses conducted preliminary experiments in order to record new experimental raw data to be shared with the students. In addition, the chemistry course TA’s opened a Zoom session every week where they collectively watched the experimental videos with students and then held a group Q&A session. The TAs from the biology courses also switched from conducting activities asynchronously to also have live Zoom sessions with students to discuss the laboratory materials and procedures. As such, both the biology courses and the chemistry courses began to implement practices more similar to what the physics courses had used from the beginning. Notably, TAs for the earth science course made no essential changes and instead simply maintained their practice of conducting synchronous live Zoom lectures with students. Additionally, some instructors reported a change in their earlier negative perceptions about the remote laboratory courses as over time, they noted that the remote system offered some convenience and efficiency for instructors and students alike:

For the pros, students can take the course [more] conveniently. … What was good for me [the instructor] during the non-face-to-face course was that the feedback from students for the online was better than before and I think. … if we run a non-face-to-face course, a student can access a small meeting room with a TA [breakout rooms] to get individual feedback while others can continue to do other work … it is a more flexible environment [for students]. (TA_BioLab1)

Some instructors were especially proud of their course innovations from first to second semester. The instructors felt they were able to make improvements based on their own agency:

… [we were] examining how students take it [the course], and we revised [the course] inch by inch. … and the system, for now, as a result, is constructed in the best imaginable way. (TAC_PhysLab1)

We prepared all the activities that we could do in the non-face-to-face situation. … Although students did not know, many people endeavored behind [the scenes]. … this was the TAs’ hidden endeavors … (LP_BioLab1)

Even if it were not needed due to COVID-19, I think these ways were very successful for fostering lab report writing skills. Personally, I would do it like this [in the future] if I come back. (TA_MajorLab1)

Further, we asked instructors to imagine a future situation (after COVID-19) that could necessitate the re-emergence of remote laboratory courses rather than traditional laboratory courses and several instructors proposed even more innovations to the process, such as developing experimental kits of laboratory equipment that could be delivered to students’ homes to use remotely:

As a kind of project, I would [prepare labs] by selecting themes with simple apparatuses that students can experiment with at home … (TAC_PhysLab1)

… the most realizable innovation is an experimental kit, … So, a small package could be developed with a few pincettes, spatulas, bottled reagents with beaker, etc. … It would be possible even in massive laboratory courses and I don’t think it would cost much. (TA_MajorLab1)

Still, others suggested the remote laboratory courses could be an effective teaching and learning format, if instructors could adopt more appropriate educational technologies:

We should edit them [the videos] into shorter steps [sequences]. If a student presses a button, it should play [at a certain point in the experiment] … we should make [bi]directional [web]pages so [students] can control their experiences]. (TA_ChemLab1)

It would be good to try to make more virtual things [learning materials]. (LP_BioLab2)

If I wanted to give more formative evaluations in the class and to give a quiz, [there could be] a function that enables me to see how students are controlling the screen [would be helpful]. (TA_EarthLab2)

Discussion and implications

This study investigated and described how various online remote laboratory courses were implemented at Hankuk University in Korea in 2020, as necessitated by the COVID-19. We compared four general introductory laboratory courses and two upper level laboratory courses for science majors. We interpreted the remote laboratory courses phenomena from a sociocultural perspective, focusing on the structures imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the educational authorities on the agency of university laboratory instructors and their students. The macro-level context of Korea, the meso-level context of Hankuk University, and the micro-level context of each remote laboratory course were found to be closely interconnected with each other and with the university instructors’ agency (Table 3). In the first semester of 2020, instructors’ agency was strongly shaped by the multi-level structures. However, each remote laboratory course implemented in each discipline became quite diverse due to the contributions of individuals within each course. University instructors’ concerns were about video materials, data characteristics, limited interactions with students, the difficulty of conducting evaluations, and concerns about what students could “gain” from engaging in remote laboratory courses without any hands-on experiences. Starting from the second semester of 2020, instructors have been able to adapt some to the situation were able to revise their remote laboratory courses and have been able to suggest additional improvements for the future.

The results of this study reveal that university instructors’ agency can lead to divergent course implementations, even under similar structures. We did not seek to evaluate or judge the remote laboratory courses implemented as being superior or inferior relative to one another because it is unfair to harshly assess the instructors’ endeavors to teach science during this crisis. Therefore, we appraised the agency of the instructors as revealed in each remote laboratory courses as a unique “achievement rather than an (individual) capacity” (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson 2015, p. 35).

To contemplate how we would go beyond the chaotic situation first caused by the pandemic, there are several points to review about the initial implementation of the remote laboratory courses. First, it should be noted that individual instructors had difficulty producing experimental videos of satisfactory quality. Therefore, producing guidelines for video materials could greatly benefit instructors. Regarding the provision of experimental videos, contemplating the nature of laboratory courses from a constructivist view (see Abd‐El‐Khalick, Boujaoude, Duschl, Lederman, Mamlok‐Naaman, Hofstein, Niaz, Treagust and Tuan 2004) and engaging students in synchronous viewing and discussion sessions are recommended. A collaborative/cooperative learning model could be adopted to further promote interactions among instructors and students and to promote discussion around different aspects of the laboratory activities (Hofstein and Lunetta 2004).

We also interpret the remote laboratory courses in the light of minds-on science teaching and learning. It was found that students’ theoretical knowledge and data processing and scientific writing skills could be fostered through remote laboratory courses. However, hands-on operational skills and attitudes cannot (Reid and Shah 2007). We acknowledge that the characteristics of data available for students, which was (re)produced by TAs via preliminary experiments and provided to students, strongly affected what students could learn about the content and processes when writing their reports. This is because the data too often matched with the theoretical predictions so that there were few or no errors. Without error, it can be challenging for students to address the nature of uncertainty in scientific inquiry that is one of the key learning opportunities generally afforded students during regular laboratory courses (see Hofstein and Lunetta 2004). Therefore, if we are to improve future the extent of matching with theoretical prediction, the data shared with students should be carefully designed to introduce common errors made by students in traditional laboratory activities. In addition, we should mention that the adoption of cutting-edge educational technology was suggested as a way to advance the impact of remote laboratory courses in the future. Many education researchers have also raised the possibility of appropriate technology that provides more affordances to the instructors. For example, simulations, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) that deliver more “authentic observations” without physical experiments could benefit students’ learning (see Lee and Hong 2017).

In this study, we focused on instructor agency and how remote laboratory courses were designed and implemented in response to the pandemic. However, it would also be important to investigate the impact of participating in remote laboratory courses from the students’ perspective. As mentioned earlier, we also surveyed 338 Hankuk University students about their experiences learning science in the remote laboratory courses. We discovered students’ perceptions about the that different remote laboratory courses differed according to the emergent teaching strategies used by instructors in the different disciplines (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science labs). The results of that study can be summarized in several points: (1) students reported that first-hand experimentation is the essence of laboratory courses and they were disappointed by the lack of hands-on activities in the remote laboratory courses; (2) the kinds of video materials provided by the TAs greatly impacted the quality of students’ learning experiences; (3) synchronous sessions allowed more opportunities for interaction; (4) regular feedback on lab reports and supportive assessments were viewed as necessary and beneficial for guiding student learning; and (5) student participation remained high for all courses, even during the varied situations described. While we have discussed students’ perceptions of their science learning experiences via remote laboratory courses in greater detail in other studies (Lee, Kang, Kim, Hong and Martin in press), we believe that sharing some of the students’ views in this work can enhance readers’ understanding of overall development of the remote laboratory courses.

The words “emergency” and “crisis” correspond to a Korean-Chinese term, “위기” (wigi, “危機”), which has a compound meaning of “risk” (“위,” wi, “危”) that comes with “chances” (“기,” gi, “機”). In October 2021, the change in structures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic began to shift again as global vaccinations became increasingly accessible and as science educators everywhere have continued to adapt as schools have begun re-opening. In different countries, policies have shifted in different ways. In Korea, even in January 2023, masks are still required indoors in all public spaces, including in all classroom learning environments. As time progresses, we are all going to face a new science education period in the post-COVID-19 era (see Reiss 2020), which cannot be the same as before. The struggle of the instructors at Hankuk University amid the pandemic can give some small insight into the future implementation of laboratory courses, which might include innovations that maintain blended strategies or even continue to embrace fully remote science teaching and learning (cf. Ali 2020).

Our findings leave us with some big and lasting questions in science education that are re-emerging in a new world. As we begin moving from an era of disruption to recovery, the following questions still require responses from teachers and researchers:

  1. 1.

    How is the nature of doing and learning science in laboratory courses at the university level different from science being taught and learned in the K-12 classroom?

  2. 2.

    Should practices should remain the same after the pandemic as before (cf. Hofstein and Lunneta 2004), and what practices could or should be totally re-interpreted?

  3. 3.

    Is the physical co-presence of instructors and students necessary? Or, if satisfactory learning outcomes can be achieved, can remote “minds-on” science replace “hands-on” science learning experiences?

  4. 4.

    Do answers differ according to the characteristics of interaction among instructors and students in different cultures around the world? If yes, in what ways and how do these differences inform variations in science teaching and learning?

  5. 5.

    Do answers differ according to the nature and characteristics of different science disciplines? If yes, in what ways and why?

  6. 6.

    How can we design laboratory courses that are both effective and adaptive and that can be implemented in both regular and in emergency or crisis situations?