Category: Science

Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) in Higher Education

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I have written before about the fact that massive open online courses (MOOCs) can play a complementary role to that of traditional teaching within higher education. There are a number of platforms offering these courses now, and academics should certainly consider including components of MOOCs in their teaching. Here are a few of the platforms:

My own institution, the University of Leeds, has partnered with one of the newer MOOC providers: a UK-based group of universities called FutureLearn. These courses represent the most recent evolution of MOOCs, away from simply posting standard lectures and quizzes online and towards the production of MOOC-oriented materials that make the most of the distributed learning environment. This includes a lot of great multimedia content, auto-graded quizzes, animations, discussion boards, and a whole lot more.

PictureAs of April 2013, Udacity offers 24 courses.  The platform grew out of a highly popular engineering course that was run out of Stanford University by Sebastian Thrun.  In 2012 Udacity launched with just two courses (one in building search engines, and the other on programming robotic cars).  Courses involve watching recorded lectures and then answering quizzes on the material.  This is supplemented through homework which encourages the application of the techniques that have been learnt.  One course is currently accepted for credit at some universities.

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EdX was founded by MIT and Harvard, but now includes a wide range of institutions from around the world.  These institutions began by offering 12 courses in 2012 but that number is projected to increase considerably.  EdX charges for certificates of completion, and their courses are not yet recognised as credit-bearing at universities.

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Coursera is the largest of the MOOC providers.  Backed by venture-capitalists, rather than by universities, in May 2013 Coursera contained 70 partners who contributed 374 courses.  At present it isn’t clear how Coursera will make money, and they work individually with each of the partners to provide individual agreements.  Five courses are currently considered as credit-bearing in the US.
An Example of Use

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As part of a core section of a university programme, students are required to attend “key skills” classes.  These are fairly common in UK universities, involving small group discussions based around research skills, careers, and any other topics that the tutor decides to cover.  As part of one of these sessions, a tutor decides to focus on critical thinking.  Rather than doing huge amounts of research on an area that is not her/his speciality, the tutor decides to use a Coursera MOOC as the starting point.  S/he asks the students to enrol on “Critical Thinking in Global Challenges“, a MOOC run by the University of Edinburgh.  This MOOC lasts five weeks and requires 3-5 hours of work per week.  After each of the MOOC classes, the tutor discusses the session with the students.

Blood-sucking mites are worse in mid-summer for damselflies

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Background: Parasites drain resources from their hosts in order to survive and reproduce.  The effects that this has on the host have been shown to be substantial in some species of dragonfly and damselfly. However, in order to assess how serious these effects are, we need to know something about patterns of parasitism: how many parasites does an animal carry and how does that number vary throughout the year?

What we did: We had a two year study looking at a single population of the azure damselfly, Coenagrion puella, at a single site in southern England.  All the damselflies (1036 in total) emerging from the pond were caught, marked individually, and the number of parasitic mites that were clinging to them were counted. Technically these mites don’t suck blood, but they do feed on the “haemolymph” of the insects, which is the insect equivalent.  We had a number of hypotheses as to what might drive variations in parasitism: higher temperatures might increase the effectiveness of mites at finding and latching-on to hosts, larger animals might have more parasites, or there might be a difference between sexes in parasitism. We found that most of the variation in parasitism was related to the animals emerging in the middle of the season having the most parasites, while animals emerging early or late had fewer parasites.

Importance: The seasonal pattern suggests that variation in parasitism is the result of ecological interactions where parasites have evolved to take advantage of their hosts’ patterns of development. Given that dragonflies and damselflies have been shown to be emerging at different times in response to climate change, it remains to be seen whether mites will be able to track these changes.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Phenology determines seasonal variation in ectoparasite loads in a natural insect population”, was published in the journal Ecological Entomology in 2010. You can find this paper online at the publisher, or on Figshare.

Image credit: Brad Smith, CC BY-NC 2.0, http://bit.ly/1q6YTeA

Dragonflies get old, just like us!

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Background:  Ageing is thought to be one of the most widespread biological phenomenon, though it has often been said that insects do not live long enough to experience it. Experiments with insects in laboratories under ideal conditions have shown that ageing does occur, but there are very few studies that have demonstrated this in the wild.

What we did: We used two extensive datasets of sightings of the azure damselfly, Coenagrion puella, to look for an effect of “demographic senescence”.  What this means is that the chance of an animal dying on any given day increases as it gets older.  Hundreds of animals were marked and followed for their whole lives over two summers.  The damselflies live for, on average, 7 days after marking and that follows a period of around 10-12 days of maturation.  What we showed was that, even over so short a lifespan, there was a detectable signal of age-related mortality.  We also demonstrated that there were a number of other variables, principally weather and parasites, that also influence the chance of a damselfly dying.

Importance: Ours was only the second study that comprehensively demonstrated ageing in a wild insect population.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Empirical evidence of senescence in adult damselflies (Odonata: Zygoptera)”, was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 2010. You can find this paper online at the publisher, or on Figshare.

Image credit: Tim, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, http://bit.ly/1vvSVWl

Online computer programming courses

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Computer programming is becoming an increasingly important part of biology (my own discipline) and a range of other subjects.  Programming allows the analysis of data, the creation of software and the building of online resources and interfaces.  There are a range of online courses that you can take to develop these skills, and use as teaching aids for students, that cover a lot of different languages with different applications:

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Codeschool offers four key “paths” composed of sets of modules in different programming environments: Ruby and JavaScript (two different methods for online application building), HTML/CSS (web design), and iOS (for Apple apps).  However, they also offer “electives” alongside the main paths, looking at R (an open source programming language), Git (a method for version control in the development of programming), and Chrome Developer Tools (for apps in the Chrome browser).

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Codecademy, much like Codeschool, offers a wide range of programming languages. However, all courses through Codecademy are free of charge.  The focus is on web programming using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and application building using Ruby, APIs, and Python.  Codecademy also allows people to generate their own courses, meaning that there are many smaller sets of tutorials designed to teach specific principles.
An Example of Use
CodeSchool runs a course called “Try R“, which offers a few hours of interactive training in the R environment.  For those of you not familiar with theR language, R is an open source programming language that is mostly built around data manipulation and analysis.  The course itself loads within the website, with a simulated R environment within which the student can work.  The content covered includes: syntax, vectors, matrices, summary statistics, factors, data frames, and “working with real-world data”.  At Leeds we teach our MSc Biodiversity and Conservation students in R for a short period, but this is the kind of tool that the students can use to familiarise themselves more completely with the language.  It could also be a gentle introduction to some of the R-based MOOCs that are run by Coursera.

Citizen science needs fancy statistics to detect the impacts of climate change

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Background:  Climate change is causing a range of effects in plants and animals. One of the most noticeable is the colonisation of new areas as the environment warms to a point where animals are able to persist where once they could not. However, the sources of data used to detect these kinds of patterns tend not to be systematically collected and so present unique challenges during analysis. In particular, a lot of existing data on sightings of animals that are used to detect trends under climate change originate from enthusiastic amateurs who make a note of which species they see and where.

What we did: I analysed a series of different methods that have been used to control for the effects of recorder effort bias in the detection of range shifts.  This recorder effort bias occurs when there are far more recorders looking for animals in a later period and so the chance of discovering those extreme populations increases. Thus range shifts could simply be an artefact of increased sampling. I demonstrate that the methods that have been used before vary in the detection of range shifts and that some make more sense than others. I follow this up with a case study on range shifts in British Odonata and make recommendations concerning the most appropriate methods.

Importance: Climate change is an important issue and we need cutting-edge analytical tools if we are to properly assess its impacts on the world. I hope that this paper has contributed to this aim.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Accounting for recorder effort in the detection of range shifts from historical data”, was published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2010. You can find this paper for free online at the publisher.

Image credit: Ken Slade, CC BY-NC 2.0, http://bit.ly/1qAae4a

Twitter in teaching

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Twitter is known as a “micro-blogging” site, in the sense that communication through Twitter is restricted to 140 character “tweets”.  Probably as a result of this slightly unusual nature, it is rarely adopted in a teaching framework, but that doesn’t mean that there are not opportunities to use the platform to help students.  Uptake has not been helped by the fact that a relatively small minority of academics are currently using the service, meaning that there is a lack of familiarity.  There is also some jargon that you will needto be familiar with to interactthrough this medium:

  • Hashtags – these are tags denoted by the “#” character that group tweets according to particular topics.  For example, a recently published paper on avian phylogenies might be tagged as #bird #evolution.  This makes it easier for users to find and share relevant content.
  • Retweets – rather than generating all of your own content on Twitter, it is common practice to spread the content created by others.  If someone has posted something you found interesting, you can retweet (designated “RT” within the tweet) to push that back out to your followers.
  • Followers – the people who subscribe to tweets from your account are known as “followers” and you will see the option to “follow” other users on Twitter.  This is the audience for your tweets.

The good thing about Twitter is that there is a lot of information. The bad thing about Twitter is that there is a lot of information. Using Twitter effectively means being able to take what you can from the stream of data without feeling too bad about letting a lot of it slide past. This can be helped by managing lists of users of particular interest, and by using programmes that interface with Twitter, such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.

An Example of Use
As part of a tutorial on research methods, a class of eight second year undergraduates are given the table of contents to three leading ecology journals from the past few weeks and are told to find a paper that they are interested in and engage with one of the authors on Twitter.  The exchange should involve questions related to the content of the paper or the authors’ similar work and should fit the format of the medium (140 characters).  The students should submit the Twitter exchange, along with a reflection on the experience and the information that was gathered, as an assignment for marking.  This kind of activity helps the student explore a medium of communication that is rarely emphasised within university education, as well as developing their online personae and potentially networking with important researchers.
Also think about:

  • Using Twitter as a communication tool with the rest of the class (e.g. posting assignment deadlines)
  • Using Twitter in-class, by incorporating a Twitter stream on a screen while teaching.  Students can then interact in real-time.

Computer models can predict where rare species might be found

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Background:  Species distribution models (SDMs) have been used for a number of different purposes. This approach involves the mapping of species distributions (like the map shown on the right, for the citrine forktail damselfly) onto environmental variables to evaluate the contributions of those variables to determining the species range. This knowledge can then be use to predicted where the species will be in the future under climate change. However, another way in which they can be used is to predict in which areas the species has not been found but could potentially exist.

What we did: My study applied SDMs to this latter problem, predicting where 176 species of North American dragonflies and damselflies occur based on the patchy recording that is currently available.  The models fitted reasonably well, which isn’t surprising given the reliance of dragonflies and damselflies on warm, dry weather for their adult stage.  This highlighted areas for which the models predicted species presence but where those species had not been recorded.  I also demonstrated that the patterns of diversity found in North America were consistent with those found in Europe.

Importance: This kind of study can be used to predict where rare or endangered species may have gone undiscovered as well as directing limited conservation efforts towards areas that are likely to have high diversities of animals or plants but have not been properly explored. We can also look for regions that have been under-surveyed and where resources need to be focused.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Predicting the distributions of under-recorded Odonata using species distribution models”, was published in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity in 2012. You can find this paper online at the publisher, or on Figshare.

Image credit: L. B. Tettenborn, CC BY-SA 3.0, http://bit.ly/XHiqce

Website design in teaching

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As well as the writing of scientific reports and the giving of presentations, it is useful for students to have experience of communicating in a variety of digital media.  Websites represent one option for the creation of content in a format that is often consumed by students but to which they rarely contribute.  However, modern tools for website design make the creation of web resources extremely easy.  Below I highlight a few of these options (note that there is considerable overlap with the platforms that can be used for blogging which I describe elsewhere).

PictureWeebly is perhaps the easiest web design platform that I have come across.  The founders of Weebly designed the package so that undergraduate students would be able to create a simple, online presence to help them gain jobs after graduation.  There are lots of simple themes that provide attractive, customisable colour schemes and layouts, and everything is controlled through an intuitive GUI.  You don’t even have to look at the code behind it if you don’t want to.  You can also manage particular editing permissions for particular websites so that students can contribute to different projects.  This website is built in Weebly, and having used Drupal (which I wouldn’t recommend for most purposes), Google Sites (see below), and WordPress (see below) I have to say that this offers the best return for the level of knowledge and effort.

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WordPress, while more complex than Weebly, offers greater functionality.  The interface is still intuitive, with WYSIWYG editing and customisable themes, but there are a wide range of additional “plug-ins” that you can download to perform particular tasks.  Wordpress tends to be used primarily for blogging but is also a perfectly workable website platform.

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I have to say that I have always found Google’s website package to be rather too basic for my needs.  The pages can look quite old-fashioned and basic, and it is difficult to make them anything other than plain.  However, the advantage is that the Google Sites tend to be reasonably clear, and if you are asking your students to sign up for services, you can use Google Sites on the same account as Google Docs.
An Example of Use

One approach that I am planning to trial (and I will update this page if/when I manage to get it going) is to ask students to create a website in the classroom.  The idea would be that I would “flip the classroom”, by giving them a recorded lecture to watch from the previous year and asking them to view it prior to the class.  In the class itself I then have the opportunity to engage with the students in a much more interactive way and the students can revisit the lecture material as much as they like.  Beforehand, I would ask the students to bring laptops, tablets or mobile devices.  I am expecting around 80 students in this particular class and I will divide them into 10 groups of 8.  Each group of eight students would be given an endangered species (or taxon) and asked to describe the following:

  1. The biology of the species
  2. The current threats to the species
  3. What we can do to help
  4. Their opinion on the future of the species

Those four categories of information allow the students to break up into pairs to accomplish the task, which they can do using internet resources accessed through their web-enabled devices.  The idea would be that over the two hour session the students would be able to build a comprehensive, referenced web resource that could be used by interested members of the public.  I would also emphasise that the same basic web design techniques can be used for a variety of applications, including to build an online CV for future career searches.

Student blogging

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I don’t get many readers, but some people do find my blog and that has led to over 70k views for the past few years. I’m quite pleased with that, and it gives me the encouragement to carry on through the dry spells. However, I remember starting out and not knowing who would ever read (or even find) my blog. Now I have students who are setting out into the blogosphere and writing great material so I thought I would do my bit to send some traffic their way. Here is a quick list of their blogs, vlogs, radio shows and documentaries that I have come across recently:

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EcoSapien – my former student David has been busy working on a number of projects. EcoSapien is a YouTube show dedicated to spreading awareness about conservation and biodiversity, as well as providing resources for teachers to educate school pupils about wildlife.

North Ronaldsay Logo

North Ronaldsay – David was also the mastermind behind a three-part documentary on the Orkney Island of North Ronaldsay. The show covers the history, wildlife, and people of the island with some beautiful nature shots.

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Eye on Wildlife – Emma produces blogs and podcasts focused on wildlife biology and biological conservation. You can also see her talking about How the Internet Can End Global Poverty, from the University of Leeds TEDx event in November 2014 (video should be available here soon).

Simon the Scientist Logo

Simon the Scientist – a mixture of science writing looking at a wide range of (pretty diverse!) topics.

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In Search of Ancestors – Simon (a different Simon, just to confuse us) is currently – at the time of writing – working as a field assistant in South Africa working on a fossil hominid project. This blog catalogues his ideas on hominid evolution.

Roaming Researcher Logo

The Roaming Researcher – Dan and I worked together on his MSc dissertation project. Since finishing his MSc, Dan has been travelling the world working on a wide range of field projects and shares his experiences on his blog.

Weekly Wildlife Watch Logo

Weekly Wildlife Watch – Tania and Gabriella have been running a student radio show on wildlife ecology and conservation for some time and have managed to get some fascinating folk in for interviews. Go listen and share!

If I have missed anybody then please do let me know and I am happy to update!

Lots of damselflies age, especially when males compete for territories

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Background: When this paper was published, we had already demonstrated that ageing (an increase in the probability of dying in older individuals) was present in one species of damselfly. This was a surprise, as many biologists speculated that short-lived animals like damselflies did not live long enough in the wild to experience ageing. However, anybody who has worked with insects in the field knows that they exhibit clear signs of ageing like the tattered wings of the dragonfly shown above. Having shown that at least one species of damselfly age, it was still unclear as to whether this was the exception or the rule.

What we did: We expanded our analysis from a single species to consider all the species for which there was published data on age-related mortality which we could use to detect ageing.  We found that this phenomenon was present in the vast majority of studies in which we were able to test for it.  Furthermore, we were able to show that it was more apparent in territorial species where males face greater stress in having to defend their territories to obtain mates.

Importance: This study conclusively demonstrated that ageing is commonplace in dragonflies and damselflies, where once it had been proposed that no wild insect populations exhibited ageing at all. We also show a hallmark of the evolution of territoriality in the lifespans of dragonflies and damselflies.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “A comparative analysis of senescence in adult damselflies and dragonflies”, was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology in 2011. You can find this paper online at the publisher, or on Figshare.

Image credit: steews4, CC BY-ND 2.0, http://bit.ly/1rrAEeW