Using Zoom to enable unique interactions for students

By Christa Bancroft, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Biological Sciences – December 14, 2020

I am co-teaching a new lab section of a freshman Introductory Biology course this semester that trains students in Bioinformatics methodology to analyze and annotate a novel bacteriophage genomes.  This program is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s SEA-PHAGES program: www.seaphages.org. Since the students are learning all of the genes involved in bacteriophage replication and how they interact with their bacterial hosts, we are reading some primary research articles on the subject to wind up the semester.  The most recent article we analyzed is titled, “A bacteriophage nucleus-like compartment shields DNA from CRISPR nucleases” by Senén D. Mendoza et al. (2019).  The primary author, Senén Mendoza (@SenenDM), is a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco.  My co-instructor, Dr. Rory Spencem contacted Senén to see if they would be able to join our class to answer questions about their research and the research paper. They were indeed able to call in on November 3rd to join the discussion in our lab section that day.  The freshman students were able to ask the scientist details about how they conducted their research and how long this work took (8 years!), something we likely wouldn’t have been able to, or thought about doing, in an in-person classroom setting. What a valuable experience for undergraduate students to speak to someone not much older than they are and engaging in novel, important, and ground-breaking research.  We were so appreciative of Senén’s time and willingness to interact with our students. And, the students were equally impressed with the experience!

So, in wrapping up our semester and thinking about how our courses will look going into Spring semester, it’s important to stay creative in keeping students interested and engaged in online learning while also thinking about how to use the technology to facilitate learning experiences that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible.

Rich Text …