Hands-on horticulture: Lessons learned teaching online experiential horticulture during COVID-19

As a result of theCOVID-19 pandemic, many courses were forced online. This posed particular challenges for courses with laboratory or hands-on components. A group of instructors at the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin-Madison designed an online, asynchronous course structure for teaching introductory horticulture courses with laboratory components. Uniquely, the courses described in this article, while delivered through the online teaching platform Canvas, focused on developing hands-on activities that got students away from their computers to observe, work with, and grow plants. The course included hands-on activities that complemented lecture readings and videos and guided students through designing and setting up experiments in their homes. We heard many positive reviews from student course evaluations for this style of course and want to share the structure and the types of experiential activities we included to engage students with plants and the process of science, as well as lessons that we learned while teaching in this online learning environment. We found that the ability to care for and observe plants on a daily basis wove together the lecture and lab materials in ways that were not previously seen during in-person courses. As instructors, we would adapt some of the components of these online courses into our in-person courses in the future.