This was a fairly easy course. It took it in summer 2009 with Dr. Kajiura and Dr. Wei. A lot of it was a review from Bio 1M03, most of it was common sense and a few new things.
Professors and Lecture Style
Dr. Kajiura taught her portions of the course by using case studies from the text book. Sometimes, a whole chapter would be just the case study (eg. Parasitism, rather than focusing on the content within the chapter, we would just learn about an example of a parasite and a host). This simplified things however everything in the notes, including stuff like dates was testable. Anyways Dr. Kajiura’s notes are pretty good though everything is basically from the textbook.
Dr. Wei, for the most part was about the theory rather than focusing on case studies. His notes don’t always follow the text book so I suggest attending his lectures. I missed a few and it took some time to get caught up. A LOT of people skipped his lectures (are numbers went from 50 to 9), but I don’t think he is a bad lecturer. He simplified concepts, answered questions and was nice to students. Dr. Wei also talked about GIS and showed us how to use it (this was not tested, just fyi) which may be helpful for you in the future.
Marvin Gunderman (instructional assistant) did a guest lecture on bugs for once class, and lectured for 3 hours straight. That sounds boring and icky but everyone enjoyed his presentation because he’s so enthusiastic about bugs. He was really funny.
Evaluations
One Midterm – 35 % - based on the first part Dr. Kajiura’s material and a few questions from Marvin’s lecture
- multiple choice format.
Labs – 30% - Lab 1 : Nature Walk (go on a walk with Marvin and TA in Coot’s Paradise and they point out plants and animals. You pretty much write them down, and do a little bit of research on their scientific name and hand it in. Pretty easy 5 % to get. Bring your camera!).
- Lab 2: Six Degrees of Separation – You are given two things, for example potato and elephant or air conditioner and polar bears, and you do research on how the two are connected. This is a group project and you have to present it to the class. It is encouraged to be creative for all the presentations in this course and really the more creative the better. My group did what “biology plays” (dubbed my TA) and those went very well. Also, you are to prepare discussion questions about your topic and you are also marked on participation in other group’s discussion. 5 %
- Lab 3: Biodiversity Game – You play a biodiversity game in lab and then answer some questions about the rules in the game and how you could make the game more realistic. 10%
- Lab 4: Mining presentation – Your group researches a mining activity in either a temperate developing/developed or tropical developing/developed country and do another creative presentation. 5 %
- Lab 5: Presentation and discussion on a given invasive species. 5%.
The labs were easy, free marks and were fun and insightful. Though there are a lot of presentations, you don’t have to hand in any written components so it’s fairly easy. You could take the presentations anywhere for example some groups did a lot of focus on politics in the mining presentations as well as biodiversity.
Exam - 35 %- NOT CUMALITVE!
- The end of Kajuira’s section and Wei’s
- Had some random pointless stuff like dates
- Not too bad in terms of difficulty
Overall Opinion of Biology 2F03
Sometimes the material is dry, I admit, but I still really recommend this course if you are interested in ecology and go in with a good attitude (discussions can be engaging at times). The class average for the midterm and labs were really good. It’s a good elective and you learn a lot of interesting things through the labs/projects/presentations that and I can say I am a lot more informed. My TA was Lyndsay Smith and she did a good job