FACULTY FIND
SILVER LININGS IN A
COVID-19 CLOUD When Gregg Moore and his students returned from spring break in March 2020, the University of New Hampshire had switched to remote learning. This posed an acute problem for the research associate professor of biological sciences, who was right in the middle of teaching a plant systematics class that was entirely field-based.
Moore did what any researcher of his generation might do: He enlisted his 14-year-old son to serve as videographer and muddled through the semester, using an iPhone to explain plant taxonomy and root systems. “If you had asked me five minutes before the pandemic hit whether I’d ever thought of teaching an online course, I’d have said, ‘no,’” Moore recalls. “Today, I just can’t say enough about the new approaches I’m developing for different types of learning styles.” Case in point: During the summer, Moore taught a remote course on field methods that enrolled students from around the world. Without student access to the facilities at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Moore redesigned his course to teach students techniques that could be applied
“Instead of taking the class to Shoals or Jackson Estuarine Lab in Durham, I asked everybody to find their own little corner of nature,” Moore says.
15
