September 2004

By Greg Rosenthal
Special to FYI Online

	Chris Sax

Learning biology can be a messy business, involving eyedroppers, beakers, and sometimes even wet and slimy creatures. But providing that kind of hands-on biology laboratory experience to online learners poses an enormous challenge to distance educators.

Chris Sax, UMUC’s assistant dean for social, behavioral, natural, and mathematical sciences, tackled the problem through innovation. She developed novel ways to move the hands of online science students off their computer keyboards and onto truly interactive activities, winning a prestigious honor along the way: the Maryland Distance Learning Association’s 2004 Distance Educator of the Year Award.

Sax, a resident of Columbia, Maryland, and an online instructor herself, knows firsthand what makes Web-based science teaching so challenging.

“For science, you have highly visual content matter and traditionally teach it in the classroom,” she said. “Most faculty are used to demonstrating things, manipulating things. That’s gone when you go online, so one of the challenges is to get across those physical and spatial relationships with more than words.”

Because the average faculty member lacks the artistic skills to communicate such information, most rely on the written word. “That is not enough for some students,” Sax said. “Demonstrations and manipulations make it more concrete.”

Sax grappled with these issues when she helped create UMUC’s first online science courses, Concepts of Biology (BIOL 101) and Laboratory in Biology (BIOL 102).

“Students purchase a commercial lab kit,” she said. “They do some activities at home in the kitchen using kit materials and items from the grocery store and hardware store. We also built activities students have to do online, including manipulating and building cells and atoms, and manipulating chromosomes to properly construct the stages of mitosis and meiosis.”

For meiosis, she added, students use the computer mouse to drag and drop chromosomes in the right sequence and then answer corresponding questions. The instructor then grades the responses.

“If they haven’t properly built or manipulated the pieces, they can’t answer the questions appropriately,” said Sax. Thanks to the talents of people like Emily Medina, Sharon Goodall, and Nancy Benson in UMUC’s course development unit, professors now have a variety of such online science drag-and-drop activities to choose from.

Science and math anxiety constitute a second critical issue in science distance education, said Sax. “A lot of science students are just fulfilling general education requirements, so we also created resources that support students with minimal science and math backgrounds,” she said. “We teach them how to prepare for a science course, how to organize their notes, how to approach the class. More than just teaching the course, we try to support the students’ needs in other areas.”

In the future, the 44-year-old assistant dean sees online courses using ever more technology, including online audio and video, to help provide students with science demonstrations. The challenge lies in not surpassing the technological skills and computer hardware and software of students and faculty alike, she said.

Sax earned her BS in microbiology from the University of Rochester in 1982 and received her PhD in human genetics from the Medical College of Virginia in 1987.