 Experimentation with this really large group in a traditional classroom, my chair asked if I'd be interested in experimenting with online teaching, and I thought, hmm, potentially, I'm getting used to it a little bit, I'm seeing its benefits, and maybe I can just flip it the other way. Do most of the content online, but some of the content face to face. So over the summer, I did an online course with several face to face sessions of the human ecology course, and wound up absolutely loving it. I think it may be my favorite format for this course for a particular set of students for another type of students that really still do like the traditional classroom. But in terms of getting me excited about the material, teaching it online gave me a chance to see the material in a new way and interact with my students in a new way. So one of my favorite aspects of the human ecology class is this natural resource management simulation game. It's a fishing boat exercise developed by Jean Myers, and then I've extended it a little bit from there, where the students come and they act like fishermen, or fish or women. They each have a boat. They each try to catch as many fish as they can out of the sea. The sea, which is me, spawns and produces more fish, but at some point, if they're fishing too hard on the system, I crash, and we lose all of our fish, and they lose their livelihood. So their goal is to catch as many fish as they can without crashing the system. This is obviously a face to face game. It is super low technology. The fish are a little styrofoam or foam fish pieces of boats or little yogurt containers. I mean, it's very much about the conversation that we have. We're interacting with each other, and the students interacting with each other, seeing what the other boats are doing, deciding to fish harder, not knowing how many fish are in the ocean, and that entire process. When I went to the online course, I couldn't take that game away because it taught so much about natural resource management. But half of my students were around our town, and half of my students in the online course were elsewhere, especially out on the Olympic Peninsula. And so I needed to figure out a way to teach the course, or teach that game in the course in a new way, in a sort of blended environment. Half of the students came in for a face to face meeting. They were on campus, and we played the game as we would traditionally play the game. Half the students who were away, I set up a collaborative online meeting space. One that luckily had a few technologies. It had a voting feature. It had a chat feature that allowed the students to chat with each other, and it had a way for them to see each other's images and a way for me to present on the screen what was going on. So I created something that looked a little bit like Jeopardy, where they could all see the game board, and they could select their choices. And they immediately took the technology and started chatting with each other. Even faster and in more complex ways than the students in the traditional classroom, they immediately started talking with each other about what should we do as a group, even though they had never met each other face to face. And they were in all these different places. So when I started asking them to vote, how many faces do you want to catch? Are you willing to take this penalty for this potential benefit? Students started using the chat feature to say, hey, I'll chip in and I'll help you pay the penalty if you'll be willing to do the management strategy, which I think will improve the whole fishing series. And they were more successful than the traditional students in not crashing the system and then actually getting the system to a point of sustained availability, which I found fascinating.