DIY ecology class: Transitioning field activities to an online format

Abstract

Ecology class is a faculty favorite for several reasons. For those of us with backgrounds in conservation biology, biodiversity, and evolution, teaching ecology is like spending time with a dear friend. We get to revisit the ideas and concepts that made us passionate about biology in the first place and our excitement is vivid, tangible, and uncontainable. Our love for the subject bubbles over when we lecture, when we explain a laboratory procedure, or when we get behind the wheel of our 15-passenger vans full of eager students. Ecology class requires us to take ourselves a little less seriously. We kneel in the dirt, sweat while climbing the trail, and get mud under our fingernails while showing our students the interconnected beauty of the world. Ecology class is a great equalizer. Each person in the room, student and faculty alike, breathes the same air and is exposed to the same environmental factors, reminding us that we are all in this together. Our differences are less notable when we are crouching by the same stream or posing for a selfie together in front of a waterfall. Ecology class welcomes innovation and ambiguity. Students create novel experiments knowing that they are in control of the research and interpretation. The benefits of fieldbased ecology experiences have been presented elsewhere (Beck &

Taking practical learning in STEM education home: Examples from do‐it‐yourself experiments in plant biology

“…Designing such experiments requires flexibility enough to adapt to all the different students home situations for all to be able to achieve the same learning outcomes. To our knowledge, there are few examples of such at-home DIY experiments in STEM disciplines documented in the literature, but we found some in physics (Fox et al, 2020;Turner & Parisi, 2008), engineering (Rossiter et al, 2019) chemistry (Gendjova, 2007), and ecology (Creech & Shriner, 2020).…”

“…During the COVID-19 pandemic many universities all over the world were, and still are, faced with closed facilities (Bao, 2020;Sahu, 2020). Practical teaching had to be re-designed to fit off-campus teaching which had consequences for many important educational platforms in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, such as laboratory training (Campbell et al, 2020;Noel et al, 2020), clinical laboratories (Cai et al, 2020;Franchi, 2020), and field courses (Barton, 2020;Creech & Shriner, 2020).…”

“…Combining the increased autonomy by allowing students to do the experiments by themselves, with an inquiry-based experimental design will increase students' academic self-esteem (Ballen et al, 2017;Zurlifan et al, 2018). However, as with all off-campus teaching, the lack of in-person interaction between student and teacher, as well as student-student collaborations, could have negative effects on the students learning outcome (Faulconer & Gruss, 2018;Theodosiou & Corbin, 2020) and social connections with the group (Creech & Shriner, 2020;Theodosiou & Corbin, 2020).…”

“…For experiments using equipment, students have at home, we need to have student equity in mind (Barton, 2020;Creech & Shriner, 2020;Fox et al, 2020), especially if it requires high-cost equipment like computers, smartphones, or specific software, but also with everyday things like batteries, magnets etc. (Fox et al, 2020).…”

How the ecology and evolution of the COVID‐19 pandemic changed learning

“…The figure shows how interest in online learning, measured as relative number Google searches for "online learning" beginning January 2019 up to June 30 2020 in the USA, increased exponentially in parallel to the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 infections. Data used in the figure are available at https://github.com/maace vedo/covid 19gtr ends for students (e.g., Hsu, 2020), providing guidelines, insights, and instructions to safely maintain experiential or active learning or teach topics not well-suited to online delivery (e.g., Acevedo, 2020;Creech & Shriner, 2020;Hines et al, 2020;Lashley & McCleery, 2020), contributions highlighting sources of inequity and strategies to be more inclusive in online delivery (e.g., Brandt et al, 2020), and ideas for use of tools, apps, and novel media to enhance engagement (e.g., Holt et al, 2020;Strickland et al, 2020). The COVID-19 crisis demanded action, and with over 40 submissions to this special issue by our community, you have risen to the occasion.…”