Hi, my name is Mark Los Huertos.
I'm a professor in environmental analysis and I've been teaching here at Pomona for
almost eight years.
A lot of things happened in the spring that were awkward.
One was that, I thought we would, it would be a very temporary thing.
I thought we deal with the COVID very quickly and that we would resume some sort of normalcy,
pretty quickly by the summer.
So I was, increasingly acknowledging the realities of the fall through the spring and decided
that I need to reorganize my classes pretty dramatically.
Office hours were actually very quiet.
So I sat there all by myself on zoom a couple times, and that didn't work out.
So what I decided is that people would get on a calendar and sign up for times, and then
it was super robust.
Lots of great questions about whatever, especially from seniors that were sort of trying to figure
out what to do now, they were graduated.
We spent a lot of time talking about how to apply for jobs, how to think about, interview
process, letters of recommendation, how to write their resumes.
We spent a lot of time talking about family dynamics and living at home and what that's
like and the complexities associated with that.
So it was super wide range of topics that students really, me and my students found
really refreshin.
Students that hadn't been to my office hours, just because they were busy on other stuff
on campus.
They suddenly found time to be able to, make appointments with me that they hadn't done
yet.
And so there was actually a lot of students that I'd never met before that I had, contact
which was awesome.
I'm going to show you what I'm excited about.
So this is a raspberry pi and a raspberry pis are basically microcomputers and I'm going
to send all my students, these raspberry pis, and this is a ozone sensor, so they can measure
ozone.
And basically, we are going to have this distributed network of data collection going on that we're
creating and building these little sensors and then putting them all over the country.
So, I'm learning how to program in Python.
I'm learning how to build sensors.
I'm doing some soldering right now.
So I'm super excited about this project, because it's hands on, which is what my lab courses
are.
But it doesn't require wet chemistry and people aren't doing dangerous experiments at home.
They're simply doing some electronics where they're plugging stuff in and, and then, doing
some coding.
So this is really driving home, how we collect environmental science data, what the data
quality is, what the data problems are, what goes into building sensors, where you put
them can make a difference.
So the students actually get to experiment with all those questions in the class, which
is exactly what I will do, even if they were here.
So this, this technology is something that I will basically use next year, or next spring,
even if we're in person, I have been to probably two workshops per day for about four weeks
now.
And then week long workshop where our faculty were all together, working together, on addressing
issues around what teaching online looks like.
And I will say that we are super excited.
So the faculty working together, you learn a lot about what each other are doing or thinking,
and it gives you ideas.
Teaching a course online isn't at all a sacrifice of learning.
It's just a different way of structuring a course.
And once I understood or we understood, how you structure courses differently, I'm actually
super excited about teaching in the fall.
I don't want to, I want to oversell it.
I think, we have as a residential institution, I think there's something really compelling
about that model, but I think this is still going to be a really high quality educational
experience.
And I think we'll be able to build not only community within the class, but I think we'll
get, really great learning accomplished that would meet our goals as a liberal arts college.