Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Details about this class

Hello! My name is Dr. Jennifer Cooper, and I’m teaching this section of BI112. Some general course information is provided below, and you can expect to get more details later. When we get closer to the start of the term, I’ll post a syllabus and course schedule. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me:

jennifer.cooper11@pcc.edu

BI112 is designed to prepare you for anatomy and physiology by helping you build a foundation of biological concepts and vocabulary. These are biology basics that you will be expected to know before taking anatomy and physiology.  If you take this course, you will learn the essentials of cell biology- the chemistry of cells, cell structure and function, how cells harness energy, and how they divide, passing on hereditary information.

Attendance, Class Meetings, and Workload

This section of BI112 is fully on campus. We will meet twice a week for lecture and once a week for lab. Regular attendance is required in lecture. Classroom meetings will typically include traditional lecture along with some individual or group work.

Lab is an integral part of this course. Students prepare for lab by reading the assigned chapter in the lab manual, and com to lab ready to engage in the experiments and observations scheduled. Students will work in groups, and their activities are self-directed. As the instructor it is my job to facilitate student lab activities, but I won’t provide step-by-step direction. Lab attendance is mandatory; if you miss 2 or more labs, you will have an automatic F for the entire course, regardless of your lecture or lab points. There are no lab make-ups.

Outside the classroom and lab, you should plan to read and study one to two chapters of the textbook and read the lab exercise in the manual. Every week there will be lecture assignments due. Every week in lab (except for the first one) there will be a lab quiz, a prelab assignment, and a microscope assignment. A general rule of thumb for college courses is that you can expect to study 3 to 5 hours per credit hour off campus each week, plus the contact time on campus.  For a 5-credit course like this one, you should expect to spend about 15 hours at home reading and studying.

Course Materials

Textbook: We use Campbell Biology in Focus 3^rd edition. Modified Mastering Biology is not required, but some students like to use it on their own. You can use the 2^nd edition or the global/international edition of Biology in Focus, if you prefer. Another option for a textbook is the open resource text at openstax.org (Biology 2e). Please note, however, that the course materials are based on Biology in Focus.

Lab Manual: Briggs, N., Cawley, K., Brown-Istvan, L., Fergusson-Kolmes, L., Neps, S., Schaerer, B., Galante, L., and Simon, B.  (2018).  Cell biology for the health sciences lab manual.  Portland, OR: PCC Print Center.