Contact Hours
Previously, contact hours were met through a combination of traditional lecture-style class time, group field projects completed synchronously during scheduled class periods, and solo field projects completed asynchronously. Under remote instruction, contact hours were shifted to a combination of synchronous Zoom lectures to cover the week’s reading from the California Naturalist Handbook and set up the weekly activity, and asynchronous individual efforts towards completion of the ‘group’ field project and solo field projects by students separately. See the Participatory Science Project section for details on how the field projects were converted to remote instruction. Zoom lectures were recorded and posted to the course Learning Management System (LMS, in this case Canvas) for student reference. Course points were awarded for attendance; however students who could not attend in the moment could make up these points. Learning objectives for each lecture were rephrased as questions and a student who missed a lecture could provide written responses to the questions in order to receive ‘attendance’ points for that lecture. This make-up assignment was used only once in the quarter.