In the 2020 Winter, the COVID-19 pandemic challenged all sectors, including higher education. All undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty experienced extreme stress shifting teaching and learning to a virtual environment. The laboratory closures heavily impacted laboratory-based disciplines, including chemistry. Especially the first-year chemistry students with minimal hands-on chemistry knowledge from the high school chemistry curriculum struggled to comprehend the practical skills. As a result, many virtual teaching tools were implemented to create a virtual laboratory environment to facilitate student learning.

Although the virtual laboratories don’t give students a holistic experience or can replace the in-person laboratories, they were a temporary solution to deliver the practical component. Virtual experiments provided students with a flexible, just-in-time learning environment to practice the lab safety rules and regulations, receive immediate feedback from the teaching assistants, and try the experiment unlimited times to practice the techniques.

            The first part of this paper will present all the tools, strategies, and methods used to deliver the virtual laboratories in a large first-year chemistry course during the 2020-2021 academic year at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This will include the laboratory videos, simulation platforms, customized simulations developed, resources developed for virtual lab lectures, supplementary resources, and online student assessments. The second part of this paper will discuss the preliminary data on student perception, attitude, and learning experience in a virtual laboratory setting and the future directions summarising the plans for repurposing the simulation as pre-lab exercises in the Fall of 2022.