Telephone: 856-225-6338
E-mail: revans@camden.rutgers.edu

Office: 210 Science Building, Rutgers-Camden.

Office hours: Because this is an online course, my guess is that you will wish to contact me via email, which I will check many times during the day and up to about 9:00 p.m. each night, Monday through Friday. You are also encouraged to telephone me, and in that case you should know that I am on campus Monday through Friday from about 8 am. to approximately 3:30 pm. Feel free to contact me any time!

Welcome to Basic Botany!

Thank you for your interest in Basic Botany, a 3-credit course without laboratory designed to help students who are non-science majors complete their science requirement.

The course is being offered during the second Summer Session, June 23-July 17, 2008. I have been teaching online (internet) courses for several years, and I am delighted you are thinking about venturing into this new method of learning. The following information may help you decide it you wish to register for the course.  If you decide to register, you may do so online via the Rutgers Summer Session homepage:

http://summer.camden.rutgers.edu

If you decide to take this course, please send me an email message (revans@camden.rutgers.edu) telling me the email address you wish to use. It would be tremendously helpful if you would send me this information as soon as possible, but certainly no later than June 9. On June 9, registration for the course will close, and on June 10 I will begin to interact via email with the class to complete the necessary preliminaries before the course actually begins. Because this process can take a week or more, it is crucially important that I have your email address by June 9, so that you will receive this information and can respond accordingly. I will send you an email acknowledgment within 24 hours after I receive your message, so be sure to get in the habit of checking your email on a daily basis after June 9. Students who do not meet the June 9 email deadline will not be able to continue in the course, even though they may have registered and paid their tuition.

General information is listed below in the following sections.

• A. Overview of the course
• B. Details of how the course will work. 
• C. How will my grade be determined?
• D. Will extra credit and makeup quizzes/exams be given?
• E. What if I find the material confusing?
• F. What if I have computer problems?
• G. Is the non-lecture course format effective?

To see the answers to other frequently-asked questions click here.

1. This course has a prerequisite of Biology 105 (The Facts of Life) or another college biology course that has provided the appropriate background information.

This is a 200-level course, and thus I am assuming you have already taken a college-level biology course, such as the equivalent of Biology 105 (The Facts of Life), an introductory course for nonscience majors taught at Rutgers University-Camden. That is, I am assuming you know basic information about macromolecules and cells, enzymes and cellular respiration, mitosis and meiosis, genetics, and evolution.

To see a more detailed list of the prerequisite topics, and thus to get a better idea if this course is for you, click here.

Credit will not be given for both Basic Botany and Developmental Botany (130:310).

2. This course is designed to give you a broad understanding of plants.

In this course we will examine questions such as the following:

• What types of cells make up the plant body?
• What is the structure of roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds?
• How do fertilizers and pH affect plant growth?
• How are water, minerals, and food molecules transported throughout the plant?
• How do plants grow and develop? For example, what causes seeds to germinate and flowers to form? What causes roots to grow downward and stems to grow upward? Why does pruning a plant cause it to become bushier? How can you stimulate fruits to ripen?
• How is genetic engineering used in plants?
• What are the principal types of plants that exist today, and how are they different from each other?
• What is the distribution of plants around the world? In which parts of the world did the main plant crops develop?
• What are the basic ecological principles involving plants?

To see the syllabus for this course, click here.

3. This course is very intensive.

Each day of class during the Summer Session is equivalent to one week of class during the regular academic year.  Thus, you need to “clear your calendars” for the four weeks this course is offered in order to give yourself adequate time to complete the assignments.

4.  This course requires that you complete daily quizzes and a comprehensive final exam at a time and location convenient to you (such as your home). That is, we will never meet together as a class, either in person or online.

The course material is divided into 13 Units, and there will be a quiz on each Unit--all quizzes will be taken online via the internet. The syllabus lists the last possible date by which each Unit must be completed. For example, the Unit 1 quiz must be completed no later than June 24, the Unit 2 quiz by June 25, and so on through July 15. The comprehensive final exam must be completed by Thursday, August 17.

If you wish, you may complete any Unit quiz as well as the final exam ahead of time; the dates listed in the syllabus merely indicate the last possible date for completing each unit.

You may take the daily quizzes at any location where you have internet access, such as your home, the Jersey shore, the Poconos, the Camden Campus, or anywhere else.

Furthermore, if you are not satisfied with your score on any Unit quiz, you may take a second quiz on the same material, and I will record only the higher of the two grades.

If you do not take a Unit quiz by the deadline listed in the syllabus, you will receive a zero for that Unit. Under no circumstances will makeup quizzes be given.

The final exam will also be available on the internet, and you can take it from any location at any time before the end of the day on Thursday, July 17. Unlike the Unit quizzes, you will have only one opportunity to take the final exam.

5.  The course material on which the quizzes and final exam are based is from a textbook (by Berg) plus a Study Guide (by Evans).

I have written the Study Guide to focus on the material you need to learn from the textbook.  Once you complete the Unit assignments in the Study Guide you will know exactly what to study for a quiz or the final exam. The name of the Study Guide and textbook are as follows:

Introductory Botany: Plants, People & The Environment, 2nd ed. by Linda R. Berg, 2008. Cengage Learning-Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-46669-9

Study Guide for Basic Botany by R. C. Evans, 2008. Cengage Learning-Brooks/Cole. ISBN 1426630735

Click here to obtain options for purchasing both these items.

6.  All Rutgers University online courses including Basic Botany are accessed through a internet system called RutgersOnline, maintained by a company called eCollege.

Visit the homepage http://rutgersonline.net to see if online learning is appropriate for you and to test your computer to see if it is sufficient for this course.

If you visit that website, notice the "Login" box at the right margin. In that box you are welcome to click "Student and Instructors Login to eCollege," but please ignore all the paragraphs in the page that appears because they do not apply to us. In particular, for our course 1) you do not need a Rutgers NetID, 2) confirmations of login and password are not sent to your Rutgers email address, and 3) you will not have “received your RutgersOnline login information by email shortly after you registered and paid for your course.” Over the years I have found that it works best if I send the login information (consisting of a unique "Student ID" and "Password") to you shortly before the course begins because only at that time is the class roster finalized. At that time I will also send you detailed step-y-step instructions for taking the course. All this information will be sent to the "preferred" email address you previously gave to me. This is the main reason to make sure I have everyone’s correct email address before the course begins, so bear with me. Only after you receive your ID and password from me can you can use them at the Login link on the RutgersOnline website and “go to Class.”

B. Details of how the course will work

1. This course has a unique format that I think you will like.

There will be no lectures in this course. Let me explain why. The purpose of any college course is to help you learn and understand new information. It has often been said that people learn in three different ways: by hearing, by seeing, and by doing. Most college science courses emphasize "hearing" in that they are taught in a lecture format, with the instructor talking and the students listening and taking notes. However, many studies have shown that a listener's average attention span in a lecture is about 12 minutes. After that, the mind of even the most attentive and dedicated student tends to wander--regardless of how fascinating the topic! One way of dealing with this difficulty is to abandon the lecture format completely.

2. The textbook and accompanying Study Guide will contain the course material.

You may ask, "If there will be no lectures, how will I learn the material and know what's important for the exams?" In this course, the focus will be on the textbook. Nowadays, introductory botany textbooks generally are quite good. For example, they are written in a clear and interesting manner, they have colorful diagrams and photographs, they have explanatory tables and other pedagogical features, and they have summaries and various self-test items at the end of each chapter. The main drawback of most botany texts is that they tend to be encyclopedic--the authors are afraid of leaving out a professor's favorite topic, and thus they include almost every topic! This leads to the student's most common question: "What material do I need to know for the exam?"

For this course, I select what I consider to be one of the best-written botany texts for nonscience students, and I prepare a Study Guide to accompany it. This Study Guide  will lead you through the assigned chapters, and point out which sections are important and which are not. In most cases, I have re-written the important points in the form of fill-in-the-blank questions. Thus, not only can you "read with a purpose"--i.e., with the purpose of filling in the blanks--but writing the answer will help you learn the material (you'll be "doing" instead of "listening").

In some cases, where I feel the explanation in the textbook isn't clear, I have given you my own explanation or I've organized the material in a way that hopefully will make it easier to learn. In all cases, however, each completed chapter in the Study Guide will contain the ONLY material you need to know for a quiz. If it's not mentioned in the Study Guide, it won't be on the quiz.

3. For each Unit you will take a quiz and have the option of retaking it.

Remember that the Summer Session moves quickly, and each day corresponds to one week of work during the academic year.  On the course syllabus, you will see that I have assigned from 1 to 3 chapters for each Unit. Consult the syllabus to find out the Unit’s assignment, and then proceed as follows:

a. Use the Study Guide to help you read through the assigned chapter(s) in the textbook, fill in the accompanying parts in the Guide, and take the time necessary to learn the material in the Study Guide.

b. Sometime before the deadline for that Unit, visit the Rutgersonline website (http://rutgersonline.net), log in, "Go to class," and take a quiz on the assigned material for that Unit. The bank from which the computer randomly selects quiz questions will be available continuously until the deadline, and thus you can take the quiz at whatever time best fits your schedule.

Each quiz will consist of objective questions (mostly multiple choice, but perhaps some matching and true/false questions as well). The quiz will contain 20 questions, and you will have 25 minutes to complete it. Be sure to watch your time, because the system will terminate your quiz once the time-limit is reached. Just as in a classroom exam, you must not exceed the time limit.

When you have finished the quiz and submitted it for grading, you will be able to find out your score immediately and can print out a copy of your quiz that contains the correct answers. All quizzzes you take will remain in the "Gradebook" portion of our course webpage for the duration of the term, and you can access them at any time -- for example to review in prepation to take the final exam.  The questions for the final exam will be taken from the same bank as the quizzes, and thus you may see some of the same quiz questions cropping up again!

Because you can do your work from any location you choose, nothing will prevent you from using your textbook and/or Study Guide while you take the quiz. However, because of the time limit you will need to know the material quite well in order to satisfactorily complete the quiz before time runs out. Thus, you should focus on learning the material well enough to (i) get all that you want out of this course and (ii) get the grade you want on the quizzes as well as the final exam.

c.  If you are satisfied with your score on the quiz, you are finished with that Unit’s material, and you can reward yourself by taking the rest of the day off.

d.  If you are not satisfied with your score, spend whatever time remains before the deadline to correct your understanding of the material. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. For example, you can read over the topics with which you had difficulty, ask me to clarify or explain certain points, get together with other students to discuss ways to better understand the material, and so forth. (Of course if you wait until too late at night to do this, your options for obtaining help are reduced.)

e. Then log onto the  RutgersOnline website again and take another randomly-generated, 20-question quiz on the same material, making sure to complete your quiz before the deadline. (Although the syllabus suggests that the deadline is the end of the indicated day-i.e., midnight--in actuality the deadline is 2:00 a.m., but don't push it.) Once again you should print out a copy of your quiz for later reference. As mentioned earlier, I will record only the higher of the two quiz grades.

 

1.  You have the option to take two quizzes on the same material for each Unit.

For each Unit, you have the choice of taking a second quiz on the same material to improve your understanding and your grade. If you choose to take the second quiz, I will record only the higher of the two grades, and thus you will not be penalized if for some reason you obtain a lower score the second time. During this course there will be quizzes on 13 Units, and thus there will be a total of 13 recorded quiz grades (each will be the higher of the two grades if you decided to take two quizzes per Unit).

2.  Your two lowest recorded quiz grades will be dropped.

At the end of the course, I will drop your two lowest recorded quiz grades, and thus I will base your average on your highest 11 recorded grades.  Consequently, if unforeseen circumstances arise during the course you can miss quizzes on two Units without jeopardizing your recorded-grade average; the quizzes you missed will be used as the drops.  Of course, you will still be responsible for that material on the final exam.

3.   You will have only one chance to take the final exam.

4.   At the end of the course I will determine your grade as follows:

Average of 11 highest recorded weekly quiz grades = 80%.

Comprehensive final exam grade = 20% 

I will then use the following grading scale to determine your course grade:

 

90-100% = A	75-79% = C+
85-89% = B+	70-74% = C
80-84%   = B	60-69% = D
	<60%    = F

D.Will extra credit and makeup quizzes be given?

1. No extra credit will be given.

2. No makeup quizzes will be given.
Because you are able to drop your two lowest recorded Unit quiz grades, no makeups will be given under any circumstances. Should unforeseen circumstances cause you to miss a Unit quiz, you will need to use that quiz as one of the two you can drop.

3. There will be no makeup for the final exam.

If extraordinary circumstances, such as a documented medical emergency, arise at the time of the final exam please contact me as soon as possible.

E.What if I find the material confusing?

As you read through the assignment and complete the Study Guide, you may occasionally find that questions arise. If you have questions or if you are confused by a topic, contact me immediately and let's talk about it! You can reach me in one of three ways:

1. Send me e-mail. This will the most efficient way to reach me because you can send me e-mail at any hour of the day or night, any day of the week, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. 

Although you will be able to email me via a link from the RutgersOnline course page for Basic Botany, you can also email me directly at revans@camden.rutgers.edu.

2. Call me at my office (856-225--6338) between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. If I'm not there at the moment, leave a message on the answering maching. 

RutgersOnline staffs a HelpDesk 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.  If you experience computer problems when taking a quiz, please telephone them immediately toll-free at 1-877-7RUTGERS (1-877-778-8437). You can also email them via the RutgersOnline homepage, but it will take longer to get a response.

In the past, most students' greatest difficulty is getting "logged-out" of a quiz while in the process of taking it. Should this happen to you, immediately telephone the helpdesk and explain your situation to them. They will be able to assist you.

Two helpful hints to keep in mind:

1. As you take your quiz, be sure to save your work frequently. That way, if you get logged-out, the HelpDesk most likely will be able to get you back into the quiz where you left off. In the past, students who forgot to save their stuff had to start a new quiz all over again.

2. Many students make the mistake of waiting until the very last minute to take their Unit quiz. Unfortunately, this means that when problems arise, there is not much time to fix them. (Remember that although you should plan on the quiz deadline being midnight, it actually is two hours later at 2:00 a.m.) For example, if a student begins to take a quiz at 1:30 a.m. and then gets bumped out at 1:40, there are only 20 minutes to a) contact the HelpDesk (hopefully their lines won't be busy), b) explain the problem to them, c) wait while they fix it, and d) complete the quiz -- all before the 2 a.m. deadline. The best advice: don't wait until the last minute.

Over the years, using the online Facts of Life course as a model, I have compared the non-lecture format with the same course taught using the traditional lecture format. The results showed that the non-lecture format was significantly more successful in terms of students’ exam grades, class averages, and overall student satisfaction. For example, the class average for the course taught using the non-lecture format has consistently been about 10 percentage points higher than when it was taught using the lecture format, and approximately 25-40% of the class in the non-lecture course received a grade of A compared to 9% of the class in the lecture course.

In their course evaluations, students in the non-lecture course commented that this format (1) helped them make more efficient use of their time, (2) encouraged them to assume responsibility for their learning, and (3) gave them confidence that they have the ability to learn on their own.  Approximately 84% of the students said they liked the non-lecture format, but approximately 3% said they didn’t like it and 13%  were uncertain. 

Whether in the in-class or online versions of this course, students frequently have difficulty getting used to the non-lecture format--primarily the idea of working through the Study Guide on their own and budgeting their time to study for two exams per week--but after a few weeks most students had made the adjustment and were into the rhythm of the course. Please note that you, as a Summer Session student, do not have the luxury of having a few weeks to make the adjustment. Because Summer Session courses are so intensive and proceed at such a rapid pace, you must adjust within the first few days of the course.  Don't become discouraged during the first week. With a little effort you will soon develop a study plan that works for you.

Interested students can obtain a copy of a journal article that gives a detailed comparison of the two formats for
this course.  The citation for a request through interlibrary loan is as follows:

Alternatively, I would be happy to send you a photocopy via USmail if you give me your mailing address.

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