From Dynamic Ecology by Meghan Duffy, a University of Michigan ecologist and professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
When thinking about how to adjust Intro Bio for the realities of Fall 2020 teaching, we made a few changes to the course. One major change is that the class is now fully flipped — the students watch asynchronous lectures on their own (we made these using lecture recordings from previous semesters, which had the advantage of having responses to questions previous students asked when they first learned the material) and the synchronous (but recorded for asynchronous viewing if needed) sessions are used for “active learning sessions” where we work through old exam problems and activities to help students organize information (e.g., a table comparing and contrasting gene flow and genetic drift). I think the active learning sessions have been really helpful for student learning, and all of the student feedback about them has been positive. They love the active learning sessions! But that’s not the focus of this post.
The focus of this post is another change we made: moving to more frequent exams.