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Shifting to online instruction

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A remote video session with Michelle Stocker, Assistant Professor of Geobiology in the Department of Geosciences, who is one of many faculty members at Virginia Tech having to quickly shift to online instruction during the coronavirus pandemic.

[00:00:00] >> Well, this class is entirely specimen-based, so it's the hands-on minds-on and all-in, and it very much is all in person looking at physical object kind of thing, so it's been quite a transition to be making. So I grabbed the specimens that I thought would be either most interesting or most useful for the students to see for the rest of course so that I can try and do some sort of like in person demonstrations with them pointing out different features. [00:00:30] Here's my dog, a little bit, not quite a dog as it's missing the top of its head here, but here's a dog skull so this is the physical object itself but if I can CT scan this object, then I have digital representation of it. So on your computer then, you can have something that is the dog skull essentially that you can spin around and you can rotate this way and that way you can zoom in and look for any detail at this tooth. [00:00:56] So one of the things that the students have to do is learn all the bones of the skull in articulation like this guy where he's all put together and then in disarticulated. More like this other guy over here. It's in a box. So the last time I taught it, no, it was entirely in person. [00:01:15] This is quite a change to have to do it on line. So this is still a crocodilian skull but it's all taken apart and this is something that we do in the lab. So students have worked with me to dissect specimens, phy