Papers for students to report on

One of the Biology 121 project options is writing a report on a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Students are free to choose any paper that interests them, but I'm providing a list of suitable papers as well.

It's nice if the papers are by local researchers, so I've emailed my colleagues asking for suggestions of papers they've written that might be suitable. The paper shouldn't be overwhelmingly technical, which rules out a lot of molecular biology papers, but this course isn't about molecular biology so that's OK. And they shouldn't be too long. And they should be sufficiently well written that students can understand what the research question was and why it's interesting.

When I discussed their papers with last year's students, many said "I had to read my paper five times before I started to understand it!" But they weren't complaining - rather they were proud that they'd eventually mastered such difficult material, and felt that this new skill would be a big help in their future courses.

Preparing for January

I pulled up last year's detailed course outline to start deciding what to cut and what to rearrange.

Given the shorter term this year, and the timing of the mid-term break, I think I'll move more of the fundamental evolution material into the first two weeks. This will give us a solid grounding in evolutionary principles and processes before we get into the nitty-gritty of genetics.

That will also let me schedule the midterm in the last class before the break, before we get into the technicalities of how natural selection works. And I'll be able to cut a week from last year's post-midterm material on evolution, leaving us enough time to get into sustainability and ecological principles.

But the above assumes that I'll still teach the same content, just crammed into fewer classes. That's not what I want, so I still need to work on cutting factoids to give more time for thinking. And on the classroom activities (clicker questions) that get us all thinking and discussing, rather than just transmitting information.

What to cut?

The powers-that-be have left us with only 12 weeks of classes this term, rather than the usual 13. This is probably due more to the dates that various holidays fall on, rather than to a fiendish scheme by the bean-counters to give the sudents 10% fewer classes for their tuition dollars. But it means that I need to cut 10% of the content from my classes.

I actually want to cut more than that, because I'm hoping to have students spending more of their class time thinking and less time than copying down things I tell them. This means I need to come up with thought-provoking classroom problems and activities, but also means I need to eliminate even more of the 'lecture style' content.

Cutting content is hard. What criteria should I use to decide what students don't really need to know about? Which of the lovely PowerPoint slides I slaved over last year should I consign to the trash? Should I cut the cool new frontiers of science stuff, or some of the classic concepts? Should I just not bother to teach the parts that everyone forgets right after the exam? Do I cut the hardest concepts, or the time I spend reminding students of the basic principles?

To make this even harder, I want to include more about ecological sustainability this year. I fear that this means some genetics will have to go.

Towards community service learning in Biology

Today I met with the BIOL121 course coordinator and with representatives of UBC's Community Service Learning (CSL) and Learning Exchange initiatives. We're trying to develop resources that will let students in my first year Biology 121 classes get academic credit for helping teach biology to children in inner-city schools.

Last year about 65 of my students did this as an optional project. Their reports on their projects were worth 15% of their course mark, making their midterm and final exams count proportionately less. This year we don't have enough CSL/Learning Exchange support to coordinate independent projects with the schools, so students will be limited to doing the separately-organized "Reading Week" projects, which are planned and organized by graduate student volunteers.

But in future years I want to offer students opportunities for relatively independent projects. One component we will need is one or more teaching assistants who will guide the BIOL121 students in their interactions with the schools, themselves under the guidance of Learning Exchange staff. We're applying to the department heads for the funds to pay this TA (initially one TA for one year). The other approach is with UBC's CSL and Learning Exchange staff, who have the contacts to work with the school teachers to find out what kinds of projects they would value. (Otherwise our attempts at "service" will just be nuisances for them.)

The CSL and Learning Exchange people are wonderfully keen about this. Because a major component of BIOL121 is ecology, we can emphasize sustainability (one of UBC's big buzzwords at present). They also say that successfully incorporating community service learning into BIOL121 would be a powerful example to the rest of the UBC community.