Hi everyone,

The various conservation science related events have been going strong for a few years now. One obvious gap remains that we haven’t been very effective at drawing interested undergrads to these events. As an experiment, we wanted to create a for-credit option. Students would be required to choose and attend / participate in a number of conservation science related events across a semester and in return would get one credit hour. EEB does something similar to encourage students to participate in our departmental seminar series. The difference here being that we would be letting students choose from a menu of events across the campus and potentially including some off-campus webinars and things. With this being a bit of an experiment, we are starting in EEB just by running this under an existing Special Topics course number.

If you think this might be suitable for undergraduates in your own program area, I wanted to encourage either:

1. Forwarding the email below along to them and allowing interested students to sign up under the EEB course number
2. Or, if you would prefer to have the credit hour stay “in-house”, exploring allowing something similar with a course number in your home unit.

Thank you.

Paul Armsworth

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let people know about a 1-credit hour course offering for undergraduates interested in conservation topics this Spring.

UTK has an active research community exploring the conservation of biodiversity and benefits to people from nature. That community organizes, supports and participates in a range of seminars, webinars, workshops and communities of practice for people interested in research in these topics. Starting in Spring, we are offering a one-credit hour seminar course for undergraduates interested in participating. The learning outcome for the course is for students to become aware of active research topics in conservation science, to experience interdisciplinary perspectives on conservation issues and to see how science results in conservation are applied in policy and practice.

Working with a faculty member, participating students will identify a set of seminars, webinars, or other research gatherings they are interested in across the semester, participate in those activities and share reflections on their experiences. A number of those activities will be web-based and flexibly timed making asynchronous participation possible and we have listed the course as such.

Interested student should enroll under EEB 496, Special Topics Seminars.

Paul Armsworth

Paul R. Armsworth,

Professor,

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,

University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Armsworth Lab: http://www.armsworthlab.com

UT Conservation Science Group: https://consci.utk.edu