BIS2C – Biodiversity and the Tree of Life 2012

Well, it has taken a few months of processing but I have finally gotten my lectures from the introductory biology course I teach uploaded in some way to share.  The course is “BIS2C: Biodiversity and the Tree of Life” and it is the third quarter of a three quarter introductory biology series at UC Davis.  Each year some 2300 or so students take this series which means that we at UC Davis have to offer each of the courses (BIS2A, BIS2B, and BIS2C) each quarter.   Every fall I co-teach BIS2C.  Alas we do not have a lecture hall big enough for 700 students, so we do the course in two sections.  The way we teach it each of the faculty double up and teach their part of the course to each section.  The course also has a weekly lab.  It is a machine of sorts.

This fall I taught 13 lectures for the course.  I covered basically phylogenetic methods, the big picture of the tree of life, and microbial diversity.  I used the Apple presentation program Keynote for slides for my lectures and I used the “Record Slideshow” option to record audio in synch with the slides.  After a bit of pain, I managed to convert these recordings into video and then posted them to Youtube.  And today I am sharing them with you.  There are imperfections of course.  But I thought some might find them useful.  Plus I have made a YouTube playlist for all the lectures if you want to just sit down and enjoy 12 hours or so of me.  Now if only Youtube would allow me to change the thumbnail image for each lecture …  Plus I note – next year I will be doing much more interactive learning in class so this may be the last record of some of these lectures …

Lecture 1: Introduction to Course and the Tree of Life

Lecture 2: Trees, Taxa and Groups

Lecture 3: Characters

Lecture 4: Phylogenetic Inference

Lecture 5: Phylogenetic Inference

Lecture 6: The Tree of Life

Lecture 7: The Three Domains

Lecture 8: Three Domains and Microbial Diversity

Lecture 9: Microbial Diversity

Lecture 10: Endosymbioses and Lateral Gene Transfer

Lecture 11: Endosymbioses and Lateral Gene Transfer

Lecture 12: Extremophiles

Lecture 13: Human Associated Microbes