Course Context 

I have taught this course five times. The first time was back in 2011 when it was known as HSCI 428. Then the course was moved to the third year to better align with the prerequisite training for our fourth-year labs. I am scheduled to teach this course again in Fall 2024. My colleague, Masahiro Niikura, developed the course. He primarily teaches it as a lecture class, but I have added my own teaching style to it. This course is a prerequisite for our fourth-year labs and is taken by students in the BSc life sciences program.

Teaching Approach

I teach this course in a way that combines discussions and lectures. Students are assigned homework from the textbook and then can discuss it in class. I break up the lectures with group activities. The class is usually scheduled for three hours on Friday afternoons, but it doesn't seem like students are eager to leave the room. I use worksheets to help students organize the concepts and ideas from the textbook.

Assessment

The assessment of the course involves exams, a magazine article reviewing recent primary literature in lay terms, and participation in class and homework activities.

Novel Interdisciplinary Content Development

• I collaborated with a UBC graduate student to develop a module exploring polio eradication's biological and political challenges.

• During the class, a colleague gave a seminar about using antiviral Indigenous medicines.

Textbook

We use: J. Dimmock, A.J. Easton, K.N. Leppard. Introduction to Modern Virology. 7th Edition. 2016. Blackwell Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-119-97810-7.

The last time I taught the course, I conducted an informal midterm survey to gather feedback from my students. The survey results showed that most students had difficulty reading the textbook. They suggested I summarize the information and add more words to the lecture slides. I plan to include textbook reading as a course objective in response to this feedback. I will demonstrate how to read the book and provide them with questions and tools to help them learn how to read and summarize the information independently. This skill will help them much more than me providing distilled content.

Course Feedback 

I plan to introduce my new survey system in the fall semester. I have included the course experience surveys from 2016, but not those from 2017. The reason was that they opened on the same day when I returned midterms with a low-class average, and some students were not kind in their responses. To improve the course and student experience, I will maintain a clear and consistent class structure and organization reflected in the Canvas modules. I believe many students' dissatisfaction is due to their struggles with the textbook, and I plan to implement a reading approach to help them with that. Additionally, I am exploring ways to incorporate a decolonial perspective into the course.

Course Files