Welcome to Biological Sciences 10. This course makes great utilization of the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail. It is very important that you have a recent version of either Netscape or Internet Explorer, the so-called web browser programs that will be used in the course.
If you do not have the CHIME plugin, and you are using a Netscape browser, you may download CHIME from MDL.
E-mail is necessary for your participation in your discussion group, for your responses to a series of essay questions and for general communication with me or your teaching assistant. We like Eudora Pro as an e-mail program, however, you may use any e-mail program that you wish as long as it gets the job done.
A part of your e-mailing will involve "attaching" word processor documents to your e-mailing. If you do not know how to do this, explore the documentation associated with your e-mail program, or contact your teaching assistant, or contact me, or visit IT-Express in Shields Library for help. You must be able to attach documents to your e-mailings.
If you wish to connect to the Internet from off-campus, you must have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and your computer must be properly configured for dial-up access. From an on-campus computer, you can examine the WWW pages describing this configuring for either a PC or a Macintosh.
From an off-campus computer, it is a "chicken and egg" problem- you cannot dial up until configured properly and you cannot configure properly until you have the requisite information. Off-campus people will need to consult information provided by their ISPs about dial-up configuration or consult with someone at IT-Express in Shields Library.
There are several routes that you can take from this page. You may want to look at the course syllabus or examine a page on how to use a browser. The syllabus page lets you move into the various course content modules.
on Thu, 4 May 2000 22:01:11 R. Falk wrote:
Dear Alice Bergfeld.
As I promised, below is additional information about Biological Sciences 10.
Biological Sciences 10 is a general education course for predominately non-science majors. About 200 students enroll in the class each of the quarters that it is taught.
It is traditionally taught as a lecture-discussion class and has no associated laboratory.
Students, when polled at the beginning of a class, never fail to express their unhappiness with biology and the sciences in general. They regard their science general education requirements as something unfortunately forced upon them. Virtually no student ever volunteers that they want to take Biological Sciences 10
Its being a general education course, Biological Sciences 10 has a significant writing component. When I teach the course, it has weekly assignments as well as a term paper requirement.
About three years ago, I began to seriously consider re-structuring the course to reflect some of the new technologies that were becoming available. E-mail was beginning to get easy and the World Wide Web looked very attractive.
My re-structuring culminated in a course that has its lectures delivered via the World Wide Web, has virtual discussions and requires weekly virtual essay submissions. A term paper, submitted electronically, is also part of the course. I handle these by having students attach their word processor documents to an e-mail note. My teaching assistants open the word processor files and save them as Adobe Acrobat files that can be electrically annoted quite nicely. These are returned to the students as Acrobat files that the students are able to read with the free Acrobat Reader.
I began all of this with virtual discussion sections. My years of experience with teaching had always left me with a lot of dissatisfaction with discussion sections. Students came ill-prepared to discuss anything and really expected a mini-lecture from me. With virtual discussion sections, students actually participated and a few students truly surprised me with something we like to call critical thinking.
Over a period of time, I developed web lecture modules for each of the topics I cover in the course. I used a simple ASCII editor for my early module production and this was a very time consuming operation. A single module often took me as long as two weeks to complete. But I learned and new tools began to appear (I now use Dreamweaver as an HTML editor). I can now make these modules essentially the evening before I need them.
The present lecture modules are really more than a lecture. They have a fair bit of interactivity to encourage active learning and all have an end-of-module quiz for some student feedback. For example, in a chemistry module, after a discussion of lipids, I ask:
"Why is it an advantage for animals that migrate long distances to store enegy as lipids rather than carbohydrates?"A drop-down, fill-in field offers the following answer
"Carbohydrates don't burn easily
There is more energy in lipids
Lipids are lighter and easier to carry">/blockquote<
A box containing a congratulary statement is displayed when the correct answer is chosen; a box with suggestions about review is displayed when an incorrect response is made.
In a section dealing with genetics, I present students with an "electric" Punnett square generator that enables them to duplicate some of Mendel's crosses of pea plants by selecting various parental types. A button click affords them a picture of the resulting phenotypes as well as their respective genotypes.
The end-of-module quizzes allow students an opportunity for self-assesssment of material covered in the module and are representative of the level of understanding that I expect of them.
Some students are very traditional in their learning and prefer in-person instruction. Not wanting to deny these students their preference, I make parallel offerings of the course: one course with traditional in-person lectures and a second course where everything is presented using the Internet. About 100 students elect the traditional approach; the other 100 students elect the Internet-based course. Interestingly, after about the third week of the course, the lecture attendance in the traditional course drops to about 30 students - the others have looked at the web lecture modules and decided that I wasn't covering anything in lecture that wasn't also presented on the web. The web is just more convenient.
I have three teaching assistants for the course(s). They divide the several discussion sections among themselves and grade the weekly essay submissions for science content, organization and grammar. They also grade the term papers.
My tasks were to construct the lecture modules for the web and deliver in-person lectures to the traditional course takers. In addition, I read all the discussion section submissions and often comment to individual students relative to their electronic discussion submissions. I read a lot of e-mail during the quarter.
Discussion topics are chosen largely on the basis of their being contentious. For example, in _USA Today_, an article dealing with tamoxifen, a drug used in the tratment of breast cancer was recently published. This drug has the potential ability to prevent breast cancer. It is not without its risks, however. Along a similar vein, a _Time_magazine article dealing with Viagra, a drug used in the treatment of erectile dysfunction or male impotence was recently published. Both articles presented a great deal of contemporary science and showed nicely how science intersects with one's everyday life. Both made for lively discussion by the students.
Weekly essay topics are chosen with several goals in mind. In some instances, they are used to demonstrate the value of the information covered in the class. In other instances, they serve as a useful tool for learning to use the Internet and its search engines. In still other instances, I choose topics that would be difficult to address using only the web or their text books. This forces a visit to the library.
Overwhelming, the students like the virtual material. Only a few students have had technical problems with access to web materials and these were easily remedied early in the course. No students had Internet access problems. About 80% of our undergraduate population arrives at University with an Internet capable computer. On-campus computer laboratories are also available.
Analysis of student learning between the two groups (in-person lecture versus web module lecture) is confounded somewhat by the traditional group having ready access to the web materials. Server log files reveal that many in the traditional group did take advantage of this access. Grade-wise, there seemed to be no difference between the two groups of students.
More recently, my colleages and I have become concerned about the maintainability and scalability of Internet-based courses. Harry Matthews, a Professor in our School of Medicine, constructed a relational database infrastructure that allows one to place all course materials into an SQL or Oracle relational database. This database is then queried through the use of an application server, Cold Fusion, to dynamically generate HTML pages of course materials.
We use HTML forms-based templates to load the database with obviates any need for direct knowledge of Cold Fusion or Oracle procedural languages. We plan several "versions" of output templates for a varied "look and feel" of web course pages. At the same time, since the course materials do reside in a database, a determined instructor can potentially make dynamic web pages with any look and feel.
Another important feature of our database approach is that it allows tracking of how a student studies materials. It logs when a student begins, the path a student takes through materials and when a student stops using the materials. We think some powerful insights into the learning process may be gained from an analysis of this information.
The most current version of Biological Sciences 10 can be found at:
http://bio2000.ucdavis.edu/bis10-2000/
The database version of Biological Sciences 10 is under construction and should be ready for viewing in mid-April. If you are interested, I will provide you with its URL.
If I can provide you with any additional information, please feel free to contact me.
Sincerely,
Richard H. Falk
Professor of Botany
University of California, Davis