Summer Neuroscience Program
AT THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY
Going virtual
Our online classroom combined a permanent Zoom room (open between 9 am and 4:30 pm every day) and an SNP Discord server. Students convened for lectures on Zoom, but most of the sessions were organized around Discord. It's where announcements, links to extra info, small group meeting rooms, and general chats lived. On Zoom, we encouraged students to engage however they felt comfortable. Many turned their cameras off until they wanted to ask a question, and others engaged almost entirely through the chat. As students got comfortable with us and each other (which didn't take long!), we found the class got just as lively and discussion-filled as in person classes.
Sample schedule
Lectures start basic - what is a brain, why would animals evolve brains, what's a neuron and how does it communicate - but rapidly build. By the second week, we're discussing things like "what is love and what does it look like in the brain?", "how is human language similar to or different from other forms of animal communication?", or "how does a brain fall asleep? how and why does it dream?". To give you a taste of the sorts of things we cover, here are a few slides from SNP summer 2020, Lecture 16 - Love and Morality (you can click on any of the slides to see the lecture in full on YouTube). As part of the virtual program, students got full access to our private YouTube channel, where they could re-watch any of the lectures we gave. We thought saving lectures to YouTube was so useful for students that we will likely keep doing it regardless of whether we're virtual or in person in summer 2021!
