Marine Science Chapters

Preface

Genny and Shane Anderson 2018
From Genny:
I think that have always loved to teach, even when I was a little girl I enjoyed showing my three younger sisters and younger brother how to do things. It gave me the greatest pleasure, as an adult, to explain complicated biological subjects (especially marine subjects) in a way that my students could understand. My greatest teaching pleasure was to take my students to the ocean and show them what I had been lecturing about. I was lucky to have a career doing just that at Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) for 37 years and am now enjoying retirement. (image left, Shane and Genny Anderson, in retirement in Hawaii 2018)


It was back in 1998 that I began my interest in online education. I worked with my Department Chair, Dr. Larry Jon Friesen, and together we created the first fully online course at SBCC - Natural History. Online courses are a wonderful way to present information. They are not for all students but for the highly motivated and organized student who is self-disciplined, this type of course is a great opportunity. Online education allows the students to plan their own time. Lecture information, presented online, can be viewed any day or time with many devices.

In 2000 I started preparing my own online materials for my traditional Biological Oceanography (Biology 124) and Marine Biology (Biology 125) courses at SBCC.

In 2002 I was asked to create a new class for Santa Barbara City College and thus began the 3 unit, lecture only, Marine Science course entitled Marine Science, Biology 142, which was to be presented online. In 2003 my course was offered at SBCC.

Thanks to Dr. Friesen, my friend, inspiration, and online colleague, for his ideas, constant encouragement and support and his development of the title bar and home page image (yes, that wonderful wave) to give my course an exciting and pleasing appearance. He also helped contract two wonderful artists (Alexa Birk and Rebecca Robinson) who created several diagrams and art images that I needed to fill in some of the presentations. You will see their work with (LJF image) for credit because Dr. Friesen owns the copyright. Finally, a big thanks to my husband, Shane, for his constant support, positive feedback and encouragement as well as many of his images used in the course (SAimage).

I have had the opportunity to travel to many places of marine interest, all over the world, during my career and take many photographs. My husband is also a marine biologist and we both enjoy scuba diving, snorkeling and photography. With many friends, all over the world, in marine biology positions, we have had incredible travel opportunities that included our two children as they were growing up. I had used these images in my teaching for over 30 years and now, they are incorporated in my online Marine Science course. I fully believe that 'a picture is worth 1,000 words.' Some of the images in the course have pictures of myself, my husband, our daughter and our son taken over many years. Marine science has been a family affair with our family and this course was an incredible opportunity to format many of these marine adventures into something that could be shared with many people (not just the students listening to my lectures).

Starting in fall 2009 I fully retired from teaching and two SBCC instructors took over using my online course at SBCC, Hisaya Fukui and Dr. Michelle Paddack.

In 2018 Marine Science was transferred to Rebecca Martin at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Rebecca is a welcome co-author, sharing my philosophy of open educational materials, and will be updating and adding to Marine Science. This will be an awesome addition because Rebecca will be adding information from the Pacific Northwest.

We hope you enjoy Marine Science either as a course or just for fun. We are always open to suggestions, comments about material that may not be clear, as well as compliments (of course).

Sincerely,
Genevieve (Genny) Anderson


 Copyright and Credits
(Revised 30 August 2018)
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