Abstract
Despite the fact that Latin-American countries present ideal environments to train young scientists, most of these countries lack local scientific capacity. Here I describe the design and implementation of an undergraduate-level blended course on paleontology. The course was taught in 2012 to 10 biology majors from the University of Panama and it had three main foci: (1) a design grounded in a theoretical framework that supports meaningful learning; (2) the application of concepts and skills to the region where the students live, making the learning experience relevant and authentic; and (3) a strong research and science-communication component that allowed students to experience real-life situations (i.e. those commonly faced by scientists throughout their careers). These components contributed synergistically to engage students with paleontology, a field not formally taught in their country. This work can be applied to different disciplines in science and to different levels in students’ scientific training.
Highlights
Blended learning is the thoughtful integration of the strengths of synchronous, face-to-face experiences and asynchronous, online learning activities (Garrison and Kanuka 2004; Graham 2013)
Evaluations have shown that when the design of the blended curriculum is grounded in a theoretical framework that supports authentic learning experiences, the implementation of blended environments supports meaningful learning more effectively than completely online or face-to-face environments (US Department of Education 2010)
Community of inquiry (CoI) is a theoretical framework commonly used to conceptualize blended learning and that leads to transformative learning experiences
Summary
Reading (C): History of Paleontology in Panama [1] Blog entry (C): Expectations Comments peers’ blogs. All of them learned about wikis for the very first time in this course Between this and the face-to-face session (phase C), students read an introductory article on the paleontology of Panama (Fig. 4). In the final stage, (phase D: face-to-face session), students were requested to comment on at least two of their peer’s blogs, or wiki entries, engaging them in discussion and consensus. They received feedback from the instructor about their posts. During face-to-face sessions phase (phase B), students were engaged in two types of activities: Invertebrates Title: Bathymetric study of the mollusks from the Gatun Formation
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