Campbell Biology authors transcript

Lisa Urry
My name is Lisa Urry. I’m the lead author on Campbell Biology and Campbell Biology in Focus, and I’ve been teaching biology at Mills College in Oakland, California, since 1995.

Rebecca Orr
My name is Rebecca Orr. I’m a co-author for Campbell Biology and Biology in Focus. I teach at Collin College, and I’ve been there since 2007.

Lisa Urry
I love biology. I think it’s amazing how organisms, how cells, how ecosystems work. And, for me, the most exciting thing about teaching it is to try to figure out how I can set up a scenario in the classroom so that students actually do their own learning so that they come to understand and ask questions about what they’re seeing.

Rebecca Orr
I enjoy teaching because I get to be an integral part of watching somebody go from what they’re hoping to be to what they actually are. I was inspired to join the Campbell author team over the eText. As we were moving into a digital age, the idea of students being able to read a little and then do a little and create an eText where it wasn’t just flat on the page, but students could watch a video, or they could answer some questions, or they could somehow interact with the content instead of it just being a very flat experience.

Lisa Urry
We try to emphasize things that are relevant to students’ lives, things that they’ll get really excited about. That’s what I get excited about. So, I try to get students excited in the same way.

Rebecca Orr
Creating learning opportunities that are more than just a static on-the-page experience is what inspired me.

Lisa Urry
So, with AI, we’ve really had to, as educators, think about being intentional with what we expect our students to do and recognize the challenges and maybe the benefits of their access to AI. So, one of the things that I tell my students is, now within our eText, they’ve got an AI assistant of sorts. And what I encourage them to do is rather than go to Google or their favorite search engine to ask a question, just to stay where they are and start asking questions, using that AI in the text.

Sometimes they struggle with that, because they say it doesn’t simplify it. But then I go back and I ask them, do you think that the questions that we talk about in class or on an assessment are going to be simplified and challenge them to do the hard work while they’re in the text rather than looking for maybe an easy route and then have to do that hard work when maybe it counts for a grade.

Rebecca Orr
One thing that I’m super excited about is using the new interactive reading assignments with my students so that they can start reading some text and then answering some questions and having that just-in-time type of learning experience.

Lisa Urry
I think, over time, attention spans have gone down as well. And so, it’s harder for students to sit there and, you know, read a whole section of a book or watch an entire, hour-long video. And so, what we try to do is to meet students where they’re at, which is to say, have small bite-sized chunks of information that will help them learn. We try to put in enough mini assessment questions or sets so that students can test themselves, because that’s been shown to be a real boon to learning.

Rebecca Orr
I was really excited to start assigning it earlier this year. The response I’ve gotten from my students—they love it.

Lisa Urry
I would tell them not to memorize things, but to actually wonder about things — to think about looking at diagrams, especially in science, looking at diagrams and asking themselves questions, testing themselves, just being really curious and expressing that curiosity.