A look ahead on online teaching for science

Here are some thoughts on how on-line education is likely to go for the sciences in the next few years.

In general, the classes with that are most likely to be affected by on-line education are large lectures without labs. Because just a few dozen introductory courses account for the majority of the credits delivered in universities, these are the courses where the greatest economies of scale are.  Look where textbook publishers concentrate and this is where on-line classes will concentrate.

Students will likely take the lecture at distance for these courses and, if anything, colleges and universities will provide recitation opportunities. It's not unlike the consequences of centralized textbook publishing, which hasn't negatively impacted university stature, but still, it's a broad diminishment of responsibility.

Trickling up, I think more broadly, the first effect of on-line education is the cannibalization of two-year institutions at the state level. These are the institutions that often are used as preparatory schools for 4-year institutions and where costs are most closely watched. Many students that attend 2-year institutions do so to save money. There are about 8M students in community colleges in the US, somewhere on the order of 40% of all students enrolled (20M) in higher education.

After consolidation of a portion of 2-year colleges into 4-year institutions, there is likely to be consolidation among 4-year institutions within states and then among states.


Will there be consolidation across states? Likely. It'll be just like what has been happening for athletic conferences. Intro courses will be shared across campuses broadly.

What about science courses?

Science courses have large-enrollment introductory courses, but many introductory science courses have labs. These can be administered at a distance, but not well. Those that don't have labs are subject to the same economies of scale.

The way that these courses get disrupted is likely to split lectures and labs, with lectures delivered electronically and labs in person. 

Labs may be the last refuge for general science courses in universities. Still, a semester's worth of labs  can be compressed into a single weekend. Universities become like regional testing centers.

So, what is it all going to look like? 

Just like textbook consolidation and monopolies, lectures for classes will become centralized in their production. This is not a bad thing for students as the quality is likely to go up. Universities will fill a different role in reinforcing learning rather providing content. 

2-year institutions become diminished as 4-year institutions provide the content at the state level. Then 4-year institutions consolidate. Is Kansas going to maintain separate on-line courses for introductory sciences for KU and KSU? Unlikely.

How many state schools are there in Ohio? (13) Think the regents there will tolerate expensive redundancy?

After that, courses will start to be shared across state lines. 

Quality of content provision is likely to increase. Costs should go down. Faculty lines are likely to go down (at least as a ratio). 

How much cheaper should tuition be? Some states want a 10K Bachelors. That's a ways off.

In-state tuition and fees averages about $9K at public institutions. That number should drop by at least a third after the initial wave of consolidation. 

All of this is unsettling to some, but it's going to happen. 

There are likely to be more losers than winners in academia. A lot of faculty get paid a lot of money for what will soon be redundant with less expensive options. 

Students are likely to be winners though. They will get more consistent, higher quality instruction for introductory courses at a lower cost. Waitlists will be a thing of the past. So will bad seats in a CO2-enriched auditorium.

At a later point, I'll cover some of the ways that universities can maintain their relevance in ways that benefit students even more. Consolidation is going to free up a number of resources. If universities are creative and nimble, they can weather the disruption, if not prosper.

Climate change and grazers: coda on paper

Figure 1. Growth curves for bison. Shown are female (a) and male (b) bison from Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma (grey) and Ordway Prairie, South Dakota (black). Unconstrained spline fit to mean weights of each age cohort for each site shown. Ages are jittered to show point density.

Earlier I had summarized some of the results from a cross-site study on bison weights. This was posted right before I was about to submit it for the first time. I ended the post with:

"[Regarding details, I'm about to submit this paper. We'll see how it's met.]"

The paper has been accepted for publication by PLOS One, but that was a semi-rough path to publication. It was reviewed by 3 other journals before being accepted.*** Reviewers mostly got caught up on how best to analyze cross-site data when you have more than one measurement for a site.

***As a note, my record is currently 5 journals reviewing a paper before acceptance. The 15N synthesis was reviewed by Nature (1), PNAS (2 rounds), Global Change Biology (2 rounds), Oecologia (2 rounds), and New Phytologist (2 rounds). The number of rejections seems to have no bearing on how important the paper is. That paper has since been cited 100+ times since its publication in 2009.

The final bison paper will have controversy associated with it. It essentially uses a spatial gradient of climate to help forecast the future. It's less than perfect, but what other option is there for grazers? Experiments without grazers don't incorporate the feedbacks from grazing, which are substantial. Experiments with grazers are unfeasible. Models? Sure, but no way to parameterize. Temporal responses are good ways to narrow predictions, but they don't do well predicting long-term responses with slower feedbacks.

Case in point. Bison from warm sites are smaller than cool sites. Yet, bison gain the same amount of weight in hot years as cool ones.

It's the long-term feedbacks to the N cycle and forage quality that likely are driving the diminished size of bison. And those long-term feedbacks take time to accrue.

In all, climate change effects on grazers is probably one of the most pressing scientific questions we have about grazers. One of the limitations of the paper is transferring knowledge of bison to cattle. But, we just don't have the data on cattle at this time.

Whoever can synthesize cross-site patterns of cattle weight gain will have done some important science.

Lecture on National Climate Assessment up

As part of the on-line ecosystem ecology course I am putting together, I uploaded a series of lectures on the National Climate Assessment. 

In total, about 30 minutes of summarizing some of the main points about changes in climate that were presented in the draft version of the National Climate Assessment.

It's still one of the most amazing scientific documents one can read.

And scary.

If you don't read the document, it couldn't hurt to view this.

Link to YouTube Playlist is here.

Bison Natural History: Modern Megafaunal Dispersal

One of the curious things at Konza is the dispersal of Gleditsia tricanthos (locust). Gledtsia has pretty big seeds encased in large pods that were likely dispersed by megafauna. Yet, even today you can find isolated seedlings/saplings pretty far from the parent tree. 

What was moving the seeds?

This winter I noticed that bison dung at Konza was packed with locust (Gleditsia) seeds. 

This spring, it's clear that they are germinating in the dung.

Something I had never noticed before, but pretty clear now.

Bison eat and disperse the seeds of trees. 

New paper on soil N isotopes

Quick note on an interesting paper regarding soil N isotopes.

Cohen et al. synthesized about 100 soil samples for C:N and 15N. They found a good relationship between soil C:N and 15N. Beyond this, those soils that were considered "perturbed"were more elevated at a given C:N.

They felt that overgrazing or fire led to enriched 15N when compared at a given C:N.

In conclusion, they state "The d15N natural abundance values, when related to the C:N ratios, may readily indicate perturbation of soil N cycling prior to other..."

Conen, F., M. V. Yakutin, N. Carle, and C. Alewell. 2013. delta(15) N natural abundance may directly disclose perturbed soil when related to C:N ratio. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 27:1101-1104.

Grazing and diet

Here's a quick note on a neat paper.

Grazers have a tough choice sometime.

Eat grass. It doesn't taste bad, but often doesn't have high protein concentrations.

Eat forbs. They often have higher protein concentrations, but taste bad.

And they taste bad because they have compounds that reduce the digestibility of food or make them ill.

Many grazers try a balance. Eat forbs, but not enough to make them sick.

What happens when you supplement grazers with protein? Is there any reason to still eat forbs?

Not much.

Supplement cattle in Kenya with protein (during the dry period) and their forb intake drops by 76%.

Many grassland managers manage for grass, but forbs can provide an important part of their diet. It's hard to manage for diversity, but if we can figure out how to do it well, there are economic and conservation benefits.

Odadi, W. O., M. K. Karachi, S. A. Abdulrazak, and T. P. Young. 2012. Protein supplementation reduces non-grass foraging by a primary grazer. Ecological Applications 23:455-463.

Fire and soil moisture

Fire is an integral part of ecosystems especially grasslands and savannas. Many of these ecosystems burn regularly. And shutting off fire radically alters their dynamics.

Some of fires impacts on ecosystems are direct. Fire directly removes biomass and kills some plants.

But the impacts on other factors, like soil moisture, are relatively indirect. Fire evaporates some water directly, but its influence on soil moisture occurs by impacting community composition, litter layers, or nutrient availability.

For example, the removal of litter layers by fire can either lead to net increases or decreases in soil moisture. On the one hand, litter layers decrease evaporation and transpiration, but they also intercept precipitation from reaching the soil.

Fires also differentially impact woody species. And woody species aren't suppressed by litter layers and   can tap deeper water stores.

At Konza, Jesse Nippert and I went through 28 years of soil moisture data from an annually burned watershed and another that had prescribed fire shut off (except one wildfire in 1991).

Examining biweekly soil moisture over 28 years is pretty amazing. I'm not sure there is a long-term dataset like this anywhere in the world.

What happens to soil moisture when you shut off fire for 27 of the 28 years? Do the soils get wetter or drier? Do plants become more water stressed or less?

Turns out it depends on how long after fire gets shut off.

Overlay of woody species cover (open circles) and the difference in soil moisture between an infrequently (20b) and annually burned (1d) watershed. Soil moisture data presented for all depths from 25 to 150 cm. Piecewise linear regression used to generate pattern of soil moisture at all depths over time. Note what happened in 1991. Soils got a lot drier in the watershed that had been unburned, even drier than the annually burned watershed, as productivity exploded. 

In the short-term, litter from the dead grasses accumulates and soil moisture is less depleted most likely due to reduced evaporation and transpiration.

But in the long-term, wood species move in and they start to draw down soil moisture levels. Especially in the deeper soil profiles.

So, in the end, shutting off fire keeps soils wetter in the short-term, but dries soils long-term.