Welcome and Introduction

Welcome to Ecology and Evolution for Teachers (BIOL 5311)! By now you are all veterans of the Multidisciplinary Science Masters Program. I am excited to be teaching this course because I believe that improving science education is an important issue facing Texas and the USA today. I hope that this course will play a positive role towards meeting that goal.

This is the first time that I have taught this course via distance education (in fact, this is the first time that I have taught any course without face to face contact with students). Although I much prefer to teach in person, I am excited about the challenge of teaching a distance education course. Let me try to give you some ideas about how this course will work.

My Plan for This Course

Required Readings
For the last two years I have been working with the Earth Portal project run by the National Council of Science and Environment and Boston University (http://www.earthportal.org/). I currently serve as a member of the Stewardship Committee of the Environmental Information Coalition, the body that oversees the Earth Portal. The goal of the Earth Portal is to become the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history. The Encyclopedia of the Earth (EoE- http://www.eoearth.org/) is a critical component of the Earth Portal. I serve as an author and topic editor for the EoE and I am currently co-editing the Ecology Collection. The goal of the Ecology Collection is to provide access to the basic information in Ecology required to understand environmental issues.

The required readings for the Ecology portion of this course will come from the EoE. They will either be articles that have been written by scholars from around the world or taken from an AP Environmental Science Textbook that is posted on the EoE (http://www.eoearth.org/wiki/Draft:AP_Environmental_Science_%28course%29). To find readings for this course go to the EoE (http://www.eoearth.org/) and search for Ecology for Teachers Reader.

The required information for the Evolution portion of the course will be available online (websites from the University of California, Berkeley and University of Utah among others) and from Powerpoint presentations that I have developed.

The course syllabus will identify the readings from the EoE that cover the topics assigned for the week. At the end of each section is a list of expected learning outcomes for the material Note that I expect that you will have a high enough understanding of the material that you will be able to effectively teach the material to your students.

Course assignments
Obviously, I will need to assess your mastery of the material. There will be one midterm exam (due February 21st) and a final exam (due May 2nd). These exams will test how well you have mastered the expected learning outcomes for the course. In addition, you will participate in the Student Science Communication Project
(http://www.eoearth.org/wiki/Student_Science_Communication_Project). You will be able to research a topic and write an article/articles suitable for the EoE. If I approve your article, the I will submit it for review by the EoE and if your article is approved by a Topic Editor your article will be published for everyone in the world to see!!!!

Interaction
The best part of teaching face to face is that it is easy for us to communicate. I imagine that you have all had the experience of being halfway through your brilliantly-prepared presentation when you look at the students’ faces and realize that none of them have a clue about what you are talking about. Similarly, I am sure that you have your presentations interrupted by questions from students that either helped to clarify the material for them and their classmates or opened up new interesting areas to talk about. We won’t be able to share these opportunities in this class. Thus, in hopes of allowing for valuable teacher-student and student-student interaction I have developed a blog. I encourage you to post answers to questions that I ask on the blog, comment on the answers of your classmates, ask questions, or any other clever ways that you can think of you use the blog (this is new territory for me so I am up for suggestions about how to make this course as interactive as possible). You are also encouraged to contact me via email or via phone with any questions or comments that you have.

Suggestions
Here is how I would approach this material.
1) Preview the expected learning outcomes
2) Read all of the reading material
3) See if you can meet the expected learning outcomes
-if you would like to check your level of understanding you can write out answers and submit them via email for me to take a look at.
4) answer the questions posted on the blog (I highly encourage all of you to post your answers online).
5) ask questions
You can ask me questions via email or the phone
You can ask me and your fellow students questions on the blog