This is a recording of a Zoom webinar hosted November 18, 2020.
In the first session of this series, Dr. Samantha Lawler provides an overview of ASTR 101: Intro to Astronomy, a science lecture/lab class aimed at an extremely broad range of students – everyone from first-year art majors to fourth-year engineering students. Dr. Lawler discusses her general strategy for the course delivery, which consists of two recorded lectures and one live Zoom lecture per week, with short assignments due before nearly every scheduled class. She also discusses how her online labs are structured and how well they’ve worked.
Bio: Samantha Lawler has been an assistant professor of astronomy at Campion College and in the Department of Physics since summer 2019. She received her PhD from UBC and was previously a postdoctoral fellow in Victoria at the National Research Council’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory and at UVic, where she also taught classes as a sessional lecturer prior to coming to Saskatchewan. She studies the orbits of small bodies in the Kuiper Belt and in exoplanetary systems through observations and computer simulations. While her dynamical simulations are running on the computer cluster, she likes to play with her kids and grow food.