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 will be on campus Monday through Friday from about 8 am to about 3:30 pm until the University closes on December 24 and then reopens on January 4. But you can contact me via email at 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 following information may help you decide if you wish to register for the course.  If you decide to register, you may do so beginning October 4 via the Rutgers-Camden Winterim homepage:

http://winterim.camden.rutgers.edu

Please be aware that this course begins Tuesday, December 22, and the first quiz is Wednesday, December 23. In addition, the deadlines for the next three quizzes are December 28, 29, and 30 (during the days that the University is closed) so please plan accordingly. The deadlines for all quizzes are given in the syllabus.

Please be aware that registration for this course will close on Monday, November 30. If you decide to take this course, please send me an email message (revans@camden.rutgers.edu) as soon as possible but no later than November 30 notifying me of your registration because I will then provide additional details about the course.

Shortly befor the course begins you will receive an automated confirmation via email that will contain your Login ID for this course. Please be aware that the email address to which this important confirmation is sent will depend on whether you are a Rutgers student or a student from outside Rutgers University.

• For Rutgers University students the message will be sent to the email address listed for you in the Rutgers University Directory.

Please access that directory at http://www.acs.rutgers.edu/directory, and search for yourself to verify the “official” email address that is listed for you. If the “official” email address is one you seldom check, then either 1) get in the habit of checking that address frequently or 2) arrange to have your “official” email forwarded to an address that you do check. Instructions for doing so are found on the following webpage: http://www-camden.rutgers.edu/HELP/Documentation/Email/mail_forward.php.

Rutgers-Camden students who have forgotten their password for accessing your “official” email should access the following page: http://computing.camden.rutgers.edu/helpdesk/faq/faq_view.php?uid=26

Rutgers-New Brunswick or Rutgers-Newark students who have forgotten their password should email either help@eden.rutgers.edu or help@rci.rutgers.edu, depending on which email system you use.

• For non-Rutgers students the confirmation message will be sent to the email address you gave the Winterim Office when you registered for this course.

All course emails will utilize the email protocol listed above so be extremely vigilant in checking the correct address in order to receive all course communications.

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 (120:360, formerly 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 Winterim Session is equivalent to one week of class during the regular academic year.  Thus, you need to allow plentry of time during the four weeks this course is offered in order 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 December 23, the Unit 2 quiz by December 28, and so on through January 14. The comprehensive final exam must be completed by Friday, January 15.

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 Camden Campus, the Poconos, California, France, or anywhere else. If you choose to take your quizzes from a Rutgers University campus, please note that the University will be closed December 24 until January 4, and many libraries and computer centers will be closed on weekends during the winter break, so have an alternate plan for computer access in mind.

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 Friday, January 15. 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). The textbook can be purchased at the Rutgers-Camden bookstore (or elsewhere) in early December. You will be able to access the Study Guide free of charge from the web (I will provide details after you contact me to confirm your registration). 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 textbook is as follows:

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

You can purchase the textbook in person at the Rutgers-Camden bookstore, online at the bookstore's website: http://efollett.com/, or from other vendors.

Alternatively, you can purchase an online copy of the textbook (an eBook) at approximately a 40% discount or individual chapters. If you wish to do so, proceed as follows:

1. Go to http://www.ichapters.com.
2. In the “search” area, type in the name of our textbook (Introductory Botany), and click "Go.”
3. In the window that appears, click on Introductory Botany: Plants, People, and the Environment. Media Edition,... 2nd Edition, by Berg
4. About midway down the page is a link entitled “About Digital Content.” Click this link and read the Disclaimer. Then click on “FAQs” at the bottom of the Disclaimer.
Carefully read the FAQs to learn the computer requirements, printing limitations, access limitations, the no-refund policy, and so on.
5 . When you have finished reading the FAQ, click the “Back” button to return to the page where, if you wish, you can purchase either the entire textbook as an “eBook” or individual chapters – both options permit you to download the material to your computer.

If you order an eBook, make sure you are aware of the following:

• You will order by credit card
• EBOOKS ARE NONRETURNABLE, and you will not be able to re-sell it when the course is over.

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

As mentioned above, after you register you will receive an automated email from eCollege/RutgersOnline, and that message will provide your User Name for this course. However, you will not be able to access our course until December 22, the official start-date.

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 have selected what I consider to be one of the best-written botany texts for nonscience students, and I have prepared 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 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 Winterm 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, login at the eCollege website (http://eCollege@rutgers.edu), "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 ontain 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  eCollege 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 hus 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. In such extraordinary situations, you may be eligible to take a makeup final exam, but that exam will be taken in-person (not online) in a proctored setting without the use of Study Guide, textbook, or notes of any kind. That is the only way to be fair to the rest of the students.

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. On those days the University is open, call me at my office (856-225-6338) between about 8:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.  Remember that the University is closed December 24 until January 4. 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 "bumped" from a quiz while in the process of taking it. Should this happen to you, immediately telephone the helpdesk and explain your situation to them.

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 bumped, 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 Winterim student, do not have the luxury of having a few weeks to make the adjustment. Because Winterim courses are so intensive and proceed at such a rapid pace, you must adjust within the first few days of the course.

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, contact me and I will send you a copy via USmail.

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