Abrupt disruptions to academia, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020, have brought unprecedented challenges in teaching, yet it has brought many lessons, driving the development of strategies in response to the crisis. The general chemistry laboratory course is often considered difficult to teach, due to students' heterogeneous chemistry backgrounds and learning levels, and transitioning from in-person to remote teaching made it even more challenging. In this communication, we will share our experiences, strategies, and lessons learned from the remote teaching of a large general laboratory course at Brown University (Providence, RI, USA) during the pandemic. Future improvements to maximize student learning will also be outlined. Several novel approaches have been applied to our remote teaching; interactive lab videos, created prior to the pandemic through a collaborative effort for students to visualize the experimental procedures, enabled a less stressful transition to remote teaching for this large laboratory course. Furthermore, our hybrid lab reports, along with other online materials, helped students to better understand how experiments are conducted. The lessons learned from this pandemic prompted further improvement to the pedagogy of remote teaching. Such experiences and reflections will benefit other educators to combat pandemic crises in the future.