Bugging out

(Evimirus and chigger images courtesy of David Walter, The University of Queensland)

Acarologists swarming to Ohio State

By Holly Wagner

Acarology: the study of mites and ticks. A subset of entomology, the study of insects.

Summer break has just begun, and the Columbus campus is already going buggy. Acarology specialists from across the country and around the globe are here to immerse students in the complex world of mites and ticks.

The 50th annual summer acarology program began June 19 and is in full swing until July 7. For the next two weeks, experts will continue to teach students and offer public lectures on the virtues and the evils of mites and ticks.

"We're training missionaries,"said Glen Needham, an associate professor of entomology and co-director of the workshop. "The workshop is like a mite and tick buffet -- for three weeks, students and experts eat, sleep and breathe mites and ticks."

Photo by Jo McCulty

Entomology faculty members and workshop co-directors Glen Needham, left, and Hans Klompen flank a steel model of a tick at Ohio State's Acarology Lab on Kinnear Road.

Students, who come from all over the world, run the gamut from those in graduate programs to U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors. Each student gets a certificate at the end of the workshop, and students affiliated with universities may be eligible for course credit.

Acarology experts are here to spread the word about Acari -- the scientific name for the order of insects that includes mites and ticks. Most students are currently enrolled in the introductory acarology course. Here they spend hours with mites and microscopes -- getting close and personal with the tiny arachnids.

Students can take up to three courses in addition to the introductory class: soil acarology, agricultural acarology and medical-veterinary acarology.

Twelve acarology experts are here to share their knowledge with the students, and two of the scientists will offer lectures to the public (see box).

With labs and classes that easily fill 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, students and experts alike tend to leave the outside world behind.

"The workshop becomes the center of the universe for three weeks,"Needham said, estimating that about 40 students from 12 countries are participating this year. About 1,200 students have gone through the program in the last 50 years.

Needham estimates that there are about 2,000 acarologists in the world, while there are anywhere between 540,000 and 1.1 million as-yet-unidentified mite species on the planet. (As far as scientists know, nearly all species of ticks have been identified.)

The field of acarology truly came into its own during World War II, when the U.S. government ordered scientists with expertise in entomology to study chiggers, according to Needham. Chiggers were thought to transmit Orientia tsutsugamushi, a typhus-like disease that causes fever, headache and rashes, and that afflicted thousands of soldiers stationed on the Pacific front.

Six years after the war ended, acarologist George Wharton offered a summer course for students interested in studying mites. The summer acarology program began at Duke, then followed Wharton to the University of Maryland and, finally, to Ohio State in 1961.

The Acari are Arachnids, making them cousins to spiders. As with any group of animals, there are the good and the bad. Ticks -- which are simply "big mites,"according to Hans Klompen, an assistant professor of entomology and co-director of the workshop -- are also bloodsuckers. They latch on to the skin of a human or other animal. Ticks transmit the bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease. Certain mites -- such as the spider and rust mites -- can cause extensive damage to crops, and dust mites are infamous for causing allergies. On the flip side, many mites also do plants a service by preying on their destructive Acari counterparts.

And mites are everywhere -- water, land, carpeting, beds and foreheads. "The mite world is extremely complex,"Needham said. "After all, just because you're small doesn't mean you're not complicated."

And the mites are gaining recognition from other scientific disciplines -- soil ecologists have taken a keen interest in the bugs. "Easily half of the soil in a garden has gone through the gut of one of an oribatid mite,"Klompen said. Oribatid mites form a group of mites essential for breaking down organic matter in soil.

Complexity aside, there's a sense of urgency in the acarology world, as the current experts retire. In the early 1950s, Wharton understood the "need for people trained in the basics of identification and an urgency for these people to work together in developing a consensus in classification," according to Needham.

"Back then, the acarologists focused on their own group of mites, and seldom collaborated within the discipline,"he said. Now, it's a matter of cultivating more interest in acarology. "Mites are underappreciated," Needham said. "This program shows students how exciting these organisms really are."

To commemorate the workshop's golden anniversary, four special lectures will be open to the public. Each lecture begins at 12:30 p.m. in 107 Parks Hall.

Willy Burgdorfer, National Institutes of Health scientist emeritus and the discoverer of the Lyme disease organism, on June 27 will give a lecture, "Lyme Disease: Twenty Years After the Discovery."

Maurice Sabelis, of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam and a world authority on mite behavior, ecology and biological control, will lecture on the following topics: June 28, "Plant-Predator MutualismsÓ; June 29, "Learning Behavior in MitesÓ; June 30, "Recent Advances in the Biological Control of and by Mites."

The public is also welcome to attend a reception on June 30 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in 107 Parks Hall.

Serious about on-line teaching

College of Education professors' workshop helps fill University's demands for Web-based courses

Dick Howell and John Chovan are paving the way for Ohio State faculty to keep up with the growing demand for on-line courses in higher education.

"We believe most courses at the University in the future will have a Web presence,"said Howell, who works with Chovan in the College of Education.

To prepare for that future, over the past two years Howell and Chovan have trained more than 100 faculty in the basics of designing and teaching on-line courses.

The two-day workshop, "Exploring the Pedagogy of On-line Learning," was developed by both Howell, the college's assistant dean for technology, and Chovan, director of education technology. It is a cooperative project with Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR).

Demand is high for the workshop, which maintains a waiting list even though it is offered each quarter. Howell said he and Chovan have received a $50,000 grant from the Ohio Learning Network to offer the course on-line beginning fall quarter. He said the workshop would be offered to all higher education faculty in Ohio, with half of the seats reserved for Ohio State faculty.

Howell considers the workshop the first step in learning on-line instruction.

"The goal is to allow participants to see themselves as an instructor inside a virtual classroom,"Howell said.

Instead of focusing on the teaching of fully on-line courses, he emphasizes teaching faculty how to design what he calls a "hybrid"course, which combines a classroom presence with a Web presence. Web components would include offering a syllabus, class notes and discussion groups on-line.

The workshop is taught in two half-day sessions -- designing and teaching. But first comes a reality check.

"The first thing we do is tackle the myths of distance education and try to dispel those myths,"Howell said. "A lot of people come into our training with the idea of how easy on-line teaching is going to be."

Another myth is that you can create an on-line course and put 1,000 students into it with no implications.

"The reality is unless you design your course accordingly, and are involved in cutting-edge technology and pedagogy, 20 to 25 students has been shown to be the maximum in an on-line course that mimics a traditional classroom," Chovan said.

Those attending the workshop also frequently underestimate the technology support and time required to design and teach on-line, Howell said.

Beth Burns, director of Bromfield Library at the Mansfield campus, took the workshop winter quarter to see if designing and teaching an on-line course was feasible for her.

"The classes are very worthwhile, but I found the time it takes to design an on-line course is more than I have,"she said. "Rather than start one from scratch, I'll have to 'piggyback' onto another course."

Howell said the workshop uses on-line courses taught by Ohio State faculty as models, exploring how they have designed and run the course, and highlighting exemplary features they have used, such as video streaming.

"It kicks open the door to the teaching and learning process at the higher education level,"he said. "You don't have to go into the person's classroom for 10 weeks to see how that person's teaching."

The workshop began to take shape three years ago when a TELR Coordinating Council was formed to explore distance education. Howell and Chovan represented the College of Education on the council.

"The professors were saying, 'We know our subject, we know how to teach in class, but we don't know how to teach on-line,'"Chovan said.

So Howell and Chovan combined their expertise and began to outline topics and develop the workshop. At the same time, the College of Education was examining how its professors were designing on-line courses. Howell said the college found that serious costs were involved, not only in infrastructure but also in the instructor's time in designing and conducting an on-line course.

"The true cost of distance education is something that has to be dealt with in an investment-type situation in a university,"Howell said.

It may not generate a return on the investment for five to seven years, but higher education institutions need to keep up with the marketplace, he said.

For more information, e-mail Howell or Chovan at howell.4@osu.edu or chovan.1@osu.edu, respectively, or contact Steve Acker at acker.1@osu.edu. To register for the workshop, contact TELR.

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