DUVALL LAB
BIOS 305: Land Plants
The Land Plants course is available for majors in biology. It also fulfills the taxonomy requirement for environmental studies majors and is an important offering for students in our teacher biocertification program.
In this course students explore an outdoor classroom. They have assignments to sample, identify, and examine specific plants on campus. They learn to identify trees and shrubs, understand the method and value of georeferencing, and consider choices of invasive plants in the campus landscaping. At the end of the term, students say that these outdoor classroom exercises have helped them overcome their “plant blindness.”
Students use a facebook-style online classroom tool (edmodo.com) in this course. Here students quickly become accustomed sharing study tips, making their views known, and developing their skills at answering practice quiz and exam questions. Student reports of this tool on course evaluations are enthusiastic.
There is a greenhouse component in this class. Students visit our greenhouse collection and become familiar with threatened or endangered species, tropical plants and how people use these plants in their everyday lives. Students also are given tours of the NIU herbarium and often choose this as a subject for their term projects.
BIOS 439/539: Molecular Evolution
BIOS 439/539 is an elective for our bioinformatics M.S. program and a counterpoint to undergraduate evolution (BIOS 317) for BIOS majors. I update course contents each time to reflect developments in this rapidly changing field.
I ask students to design a laboratory project using tools of molecular biology (extracting DNA from living tissue, PCR, DNA sequencing, etc.) to study an original research problem. The projects each term are unique. Bench-top procedures are conducted in my research lab (13% of contact hrs.), with BIOS 539 students in the roles of “GTAs.” Students participate enthusiastically, are motivated to do well, and learn more from these projects over which they have ownership. Outcomes are their banked DNA sequences, (such as DNA sequences deposited at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/ under accessions HM441091, KC989616) with student names listed or they are acknowledged in manuscripts (Burke et al., in review, BMC Plant Biology).
BIOS 430/530: Plant Systematics
This modern course was developed from its precursor (Plant Taxonomy). BIOS 430/530 is a taxonomy elective for our ENVS program, an attractive elective for Geography students, and the only systematics course offered in biology.
For each lab period I obtain live plant materials from the Biology greenhouses, my home garden, the campus landscape, or the field. I supplement with herbarium specimens. Students learn from observing and dissecting living specimens. Lab practicals hone plant identification skills and abilities of students to recognize morphological features.
Students take field excursions on campus, at Wilkinson Marsh, and at the Morton Arboretum. Concurrent exercises teach students to identify and correctly name local plants.
Students are trained to digitize specimens from the DeKalb herbarium. High resolution images and collection information are posted online (http://ngpherbaria.org/portal/) with the students listed as authors. In this activity the students learn to use databasing software for biological collections (called "Symbiota;" http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiota/). At present over 3,500 specimens in our herbarium have been digitized.
In their term projects, students contribute to a NIU campus flora database, which is cumulative from different cohorts of students in different years. "Curated" specimens (those that are correctly identified with precise georeference coordinates) are added to this database. This makes students aware of the plants around them as a living part of the NIU landscape.