How many of your students are first-generation? How many of your students work more than 15 hours a week? How many of your students want to become doctors? If you teach a small college class, then it’s easier for you to get to know who your students are, but this is much harder in a large class. Also, the impersonal nature of large science classes makes it difficult for students to feel like they relate to the instructor, which can negatively impact student learning and engagement, especially for members of marginalized groups. One simple strategy that has been recommended for helping instructors get to know their students is to distribute a “get to know you” survey at the beginning of the semester, but there’s a lack of data on how this might affect students. So, a recent study explored whether an instructor collecting and sharing aggregated student demographics in a large biology course could positively impact students. Below are some of the main findings: Most students appreciated ...

My name is Richard Clarke. I serve as the Laboratory Coordinator for all of BIO 181—that’s about 70 sections this semester— and have been working with Dreamscape Learn since 2021. With the semester starting up, I thought I would share with you a little about what has been going on in the largest class in SOLS. In the Fall of 2022 we officially transitioned to a whole new curriculum in the laboratory for BIO 181. This new modality brings together sound pedagogy with recent technological innovations in the form of virtual reality. Dreamscape Learn BIO 181 species pictured: Astelar As part of this new curriculum, students will be able to don a headset and navigate around the Intergalactic Wildlife Federation. Here they will be encountering novel species and help to uncover why some of the species are suffering: exploring the relationship between environmental conditions and survival rates of the astelars; investigating the pathological features of the disease responsible for a spike in m...