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Hi and welcome to BIOE 126. My name is Roxanne Beltran. I'll be your instructor for the class and today I want to walk you through the syllabus. The syllabus is quite long as you've probably figured out by now. And it will be our guide to the entire class, from talking about what I want you all to learn throughout this course to how we're going to go about teaching that material, to how grading is going to happen and what
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resources are available to you should you need them. So this syllabus is listed on the Canvas website and it will be available for you throughout the course. The Canvas website also contains all the information you need in terms of when office hours are and the Zoom link to that, when class times are and the Zoom link to that, as well as all of the lecture recordings and the assignment activities that you'll fill out and turn in for points.
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It's really important that you check your UCSC e-mail address regularly to ensure that you're receiving the course announcements that'll come through via Canvas. And there's no required texts for this class. As you'll see, we have some peer reviewed publications that we'll be reading and discussing during discussion sections. In general, I just want you to come, you know, integrate with me with office hours, come to discussion sections,
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interact with your classmates, and do the best you can to dive in and get to know these really cool animals. So in terms of learning objectives for the class, what I want you to walk away from this class knowing is how large marine vertebrates are absolutely incredible animals. We'll cover a really broad kind of high level overview of their ecology, their evolution, their physiology, and their behavior.
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And when I say large marine vertebrates, what I mean are marine mammals, seabirds, and sea turtles. I'll talk about lots of different species, but I will try to focus on species that are found locally here in the Monterey Bay when I can. By the end of the course, you should be able to recognize local Monterey Bay species that you might see on West Cliff Drive or at the wharf and describe some basic aspects of their life histories. You should be able to give examples of adaptations that
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allow these animals to survive in the marine environment. You should be able to describe how ecology, evolution, physiology, and behavior interact to drive the patterns that we see in nature. You should be able to synthesize interdisciplinary knowledge to understand management strategies for these species. You should be able to read primary literature and interpret data figures to summarize recent research. And you should know about potential career options
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in the field of large marine vertebrates. I'm a big fan of active learning, which means things like diagramming, drawing things out, explaining things, teaching. And so you'll see very frequent low-stakes assessments integrated throughout the course and lots of active learning. I ask in return that you really truly engage and participate. And so if that means for you creating informal study groups or
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developing personal learning goals or habits. I'll leave that up to you, but like I say here, let me know what I can do to support you. So this is a fully remote course. And what that means is that each week you'll have a structure that will look something like this. And I'll delve into each of these boxes in a bit. The first thing you'll do is watch the pre-recorded lectures and the pre-recorded career corner each week.
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Then you'll participate in quizzes. You'll complete an independent assignment doing some research on a species that you'll be in charge of. Then you'll read the publication to prepare for discussion section. Then you'll attend the discussion section and work with some of your peers to talk about the publication you read and fill out an assignment that will then be submitted the following week.
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So let me dive a little bit deeper into each of those things. The first two things that I talked about are the lectures and the career corner. These are both prerecorded. So the lectures I've chosen to record these sort of mini-lectures. They're somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes each, and they're uploaded to Canvas. And so this will allow you to watch them whenever you want, to rewatch them whenever you want and to study.
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You are responsible for watching these lectures prior to the discussion section and you'll get points for doing that. The career corner is intended to help you understand some of the possible career trajectories in the field of large marine vertebrates. So I've asked some of my friends and colleagues to prerecord a really quick introduction to themselves and their work. And that sort of serves as one extra lecture for each week.
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In terms of the quiz questions, the goal of these is to help us sort of synthesize and demonstrate your understanding of the lecture material. So I've created weekly quizzes, each with 15 questions that are on the lecture materials. These quizzes basically take place of the midterm. So rather than having a midterm, we're going to have one final exam at the end of the course. But sort of all the mid-term points are going to
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come from these graded quiz questions. Then the species search. So the goal of this is to help you apply the knowledge you've gained from the lecture materials to a new situation. So you'll complete these solo take-home assignments to summarize the biology of a single study species, which I'll give you during the first week of class. You'll basically search the primary literature for information about this species and then submit
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a one-page summary each week that relates to what we learned in class. So if we're learning about anatomy in evolution, you would submit an assignment about the anatomy and evolution of your study species. And you're responsible for submitting that assignment prior to the discussion section. Then for the publication perusal. And my goal here is to introduce you to hot off the press research. So I've picked one peer review publication
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each week for you to read, and so you'll read it before discussion section. Then in the discussion section we'll facilitate a small group of your peers talking about the paper and filling out a summary that you'll then submit via Canvas no more than a week after the discussion section is over. So those are the main sort of things you'll do in the class. Those are also the main grading breakdowns.
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So as I say here, this is a five unit course. You can expect to work about 15 hours on this class each week. So something like three hours of watching and rewatching lecture materials, Going to one or two hours of discussion section, doing about four hours of reading and then seven hours of the assignments and studying. The grade breakdown is listed here. So watching lectures and career corner videos is 20 percent of your grade.
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The quizzes are 20 percent of your grade. The species search is 20 percent of your grade. The publication perusal is also 20 percent of your grade and then you get 10 percent each for the final project and the final exam. I understand that there's a pandemic going on, and I understand that you may be dealing with a lot of stuff outside of class, and so I'm gonna do the best I can to be flexible with you. And in return, I ask that you reach out to me if you need a little bit of extra help.
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So in the table below, I've listed all of the weekly work. And so you can see the sort of main structure again, the lectures, the career corner, and the publication perusal. But this table gives you more information about which lectures, which career corner, and which publication occur in each week of the course. This is currently a ten week class, so I'll let you look through that on your own leisure. But this table serves as a good guide to figuring out what we're going to be talking about each week of the class.
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My overall goal, aside from the learning objectives that I stated earlier, is to create an inclusive and supportive environment for you to learn and grow. So I ask that you bring any concerns or any questions regarding the class directly to me. If you need DRC accommodations, I ask that you submit your authorization letter as soon as possible. Ideally, in the first week of class,
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so I can make sure that we're getting you the help that you need. In terms of academic integrity, of course, like any other class, all assignments should be in your own words so no plagiarizing, no copy pasting. You can paraphrase. A lot of this class is based on reading primary literature, synthesizing it, and summarizing it. But you know, if to give a specific example, an article says, "Maximizing growth during early years is thought to be
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a key factor in survival for juvenile cormorant." You might write something like, "For cormorants, one important way to prevent mortality is to build mass while very young." And this is really important. I also added here a diversity statement in a land acknowledgment to say that the land on which we would normally gather if we were in person is the unseated territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe.
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The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken into missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and to heal from historical trauma. I've also listed in here some information about Title IX and CARE. So if you do need to access those resources hopefully that'll be a little bit easier for you.
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And then finally, I want to say a huge thank you to all of the folks who helped create this class. This was a team effort by a variety of folks in the online education team that I am really grateful for. This course would not have been possible without them. So I hope you enjoy all of the exciting things that we have to offer over the next 10 weeks. I'll see you in discussion section.
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