Open Educational Resources for distributed hands-on teaching in molecular biology

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OER), freely accessible learning, teaching and research materials, have been proposed as key enabling tools to achieve inclusive knowledge societies and equitable access to education. Here, we describe novel OER consisting of low cost and locally produced public domain biological reagents, open source hardware and free software collaborative notebooks to teach LAMP DNA amplification, RT-PCR RNA detection, enzyme kinetics and fluorescence imaging. These resources have been distributed nationwide to students' homes as a lab-in-a-box, i.e. remote teaching during the pandemic lockdowns, as well as in the form of personalized learning environments during in-person teaching after the opening of teaching laboratories. All the protocols and design files are available under open source licenses.