In this ever changing world, I will be teaching the Organismal Form and Function CURE this coming Fall 2020. Our semester does not start until August 24th, so I have a little over a month to get ready. As Dante from Clerk’s once said, “I’m not even supposed to be here today.” Initially, I was scheduled for sabbatical Fall 2020, but decided to postpone until Spring 2021 to accommodate international travel plans. I thought Spring might be more likely for me to travel, we will see. Since schedules were already made, I added the CURE last minute, advertised and have a full class. Back in March there were hopes we would be in person. Things have been changing quickly.
In an effort to once again document what I do in the course, I will be posting through the rest of the summer and semester. The course will change, as it will not all be in person. Teaching a lecture remotely is not too difficult. Trying to engage students in research remotely is a different story. I have some ideas and plans in the works, so we will see what happens.
The first time I taught the course it was stressful not knowing if student’s could come up with questions, if we could collect anything, or if animals would perform. It all worked (Oufiero 2019). I couldn’t wait to teach the course again as I thought it would be easier. Little did I know a global pandemic would be happening. So, once again I’m a bit stressed about how all of this will go. I am currently surveying students to obtain an idea of what they might prefer, including:
- Face to face opportunity in class to film animals in limited student capacity
- Film animals at home with their own device and nets, enclosures provided
- Not to film and only digitize and analyze prerecorded high speed videos
- Not to film, but come to campus to conduct a project on morphological variation based on museum specimens
If anyone in the scientific community is reading this and has videos they are willing to share to help with option 3 above, please contact me (coufiero -at- towson.edu). I would be happy to reciprocate and even develop a network of videos students can work with. I will also be reaching out via social media, including a post on more details. Five and a half weeks to go, stay tuned. I will be updating information on this website, including course material, archiving old material, as I go.