Department of Biology

When the start of the fall 2020 semester saw Indiana University instructors once again preparing to mostly teach their courses online in efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, Dr. Sapna Mehta, a lecturer in the IU College of Arts and Sciences Department of Biology, looked for ways to engage her students. She participated in the “Blended Course Design Workshop” presented by the IU Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Interactions with colleagues from various disciplines during the workshop provided the fodder for the complete reimagining of her BIOL-L 312 Cell Biology course.

“Honestly, I was participating in the workshop for another large lecture course I teach,” mused Mehta, “but the workshop ended up being useful for restructuring my cell biology course, too.”

BIOL-L 312 Cell Biology had traditionally been a lecture-based course taught during both the fall and spring semesters by different instructors. Student enrollment varied. When Mehta last taught the course in fall 2019, there were 28 students. Fifty-four students had enrolled for the fall 2020 online version of the course to be held on the Zoom video communications platform.

For Mehta, reimagining the course meant removing the focus from testing students on particulars of cellular pathways or topics. Instead, she designed the course to focus on development of skills that are critical for success in future postgraduate or professional education. She focused on three main skills:

1. Communication of cell biology for a scientific community (technical writing),
2. Communication of cell biology concepts to a general audience, and
3. Learning how to read and evaluate primary scientific information.

There were no formal exams, but instead weekly assignments were given that ranged from writing Twitter feeds, developing podcasts, and breaking down primary literature papers to working on more rigorous experimental design and analysis projects. A student-chosen final assignment allowed students to dive into the literature to write a scientific mini-review.

“This was a huge gamble. From the student perspective, a grade on an exam provides a sense of achievement; it is tangible. It is, however, not always indicative of learning. I was asking them to have faith that by participating in the process they would develop skills that would serve them well along their future paths. I had confidence—based on previous experience testing some of these ideas separately—that the students could deliver. And, they did.”

Jin Dai, a Ph.D. student in the IU biology department’s microbiology graduate program, served as Mehta’s associate instructor for the class.

“I enjoyed working with Dr. Mehta,” said Dai. “I learned a lot from helping teach the class. Several aspects of the course were well received by the students. I particularly liked the pre-class quizzes and in-class discussions. The quizzes allowed students to have a general idea of what was going to be covered. The students were enthusiastic about working in groups during the discussions to solve a problem related to the cell biological topic of the day’s lesson. As the final project, students wrote a scientific summary of one of six research articles given to them. Some students demonstrated graduate-level writing skills and depth of knowledge—which were very impressive.”

Kate Adaniya, a junior majoring in Biology with minors in Global Health Promotion and Health Studies, noted that Mehta’s cell biology class was unlike any course she had ever taken. She felt that the ‘multimedia’ lectures that included videos, animations, and TED talks in addition to the textbook helped solidify the complex concepts in cell biology for her and her classmates. What made the biggest impact on Adaniya were the Friday synchronous lectures.

“Every Friday, we had ‘Bench to Bedside’ lectures where the concepts we learned throughout the week were applied to many common diseases,” Adaniya said. “It not only allowed us to see how the information we learned in class applied to the fields in which we were interested, but it strengthened our understanding of the topics by bridging them to familiar diseases. These lectures were particularly attention grabbing for me due to their relevance to my interests and career path. I hope that more teachers incorporate this type of learning because it grabs and maintains students’ interest.”

The class format affected the type of information that Adaniya retained. She noted that she left the class with an understanding of the broader application of complex biology and how these concepts are seen in our everyday world.

When asked whether she would recommend BIOL-L 312, Adaniya did not hesitate in answering, “I would highly recommend this class to other students for its real life applications, interesting lectures, and lack of busywork. Dr. Mehta created incredibly interesting homework assignments like creating a Twitter page for a Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cell, recording a podcast for fifth graders about a complex topic, and reading a scientific journal and creating a spotlight article about it. These lessons taught valuable skills—concise writing, improved reading of scientific journals, and the ability to take complex information and teach it in an understandable way.”

According to Adaniya, BIOL-L 312 was a class that reaffirmed her interest in the medical field by bridging complex biology to interesting diseases and their treatments, and it helped her to develop skills that will be extremely beneficial in school and a career.

Nick Imperiale, a junior majoring in Biology and minoring in Chemistry, was also quick to praise Mehta’s fall 2020 Cell Biology course. Imperiale wrote: “Cell Bio was great—there was a lot of independent work to be done, but it allowed us to come together to have some really good conversations about how cellular level mishaps result in common diseases. A big emphasis was placed on learning how to dissect primary literature in order to explain what data mean and why they’re important. I learned some invaluable things taking this class last semester.”

Troy Smith, associate professor and the department’s associate chair for teaching, is proud and thankful for all of the tireless work that biology teaching faculty members have devoted to meet the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic in order to continue to offer a quality education in biology to the students.

“The pandemic created so many sudden and unexpected challenges for our students and instructors,” Smith said. “One silver lining in this crisis is that in adapting to new modalities of teaching, many of our faculty have developed and perfected new ways of reaching students that will improve student learning even after we get back to ‘normal.’ The work that Dr. Mehta has done in her courses after they went online, not only in employing innovative methods for teaching and assessment of student learning, but also in making concepts in the classroom relevant in the real world and in reaching out to the community, is a wonderful example of how our faculty have stepped up to not only survive the pandemic but to emerge as more skillful teachers.”

Another student who took Mehta’s BIOL-L 312 Cell Biology course last fall agreed with his classmates about the value of the course. Piyush Sharma, a senior majoring in Biochemistry, wrote: “Dr. Mehta’s class was unlike any other class that I have taken. The format encouraged us to research and understand topics that peaked our interest. The end result was an amazing learning experience, one which I would not hesitate to recommend to other students.”