I agree with the other review about this class. Dr. Schindlinger is a very nice person, just not as great of a lecturer since he speaks so slowly and some of his lectures weren't applicable to the exams so it kind of felt like a waste of time to go to synchronous lecture. Watching his recorded lectures at 3x speed was much more productive imo.

Conservation biology in general is a very interesting class, but it's moreso what you put into it. You learn more from the textbook than you do from the professor. Evan's a great TA, but assigned a LOT of papers for discussion (like 100+ pages a week... skimming them to get the gist is fine, though).

Just do the textbook readings and show some sign of life during discussion for participation and you'll do great. Grading was super lenient.

Overall this class was pretty decent. Professor Schindlinger is a nice man at heart, and really does try to interact with the people who do go to lecture. However, his lectures were very hard to watch as he talks kind of slow, reads from the slides, and has a lot of pauses. For this reason I think a lot of the students (including myself) did not go to lecture and chose to watch them after the fact where you could speed up his talking a little bit. The TA Evan was pretty cool and would try to make discussion sections worthwhile. I do feel a little bad for Evan because nobody turned their camera on and only a few people would talk, but he still had good interaction with some of the students. The class had 3 midterms that were in the form of essay questions (we had to select 4 questions from a list and answer them in up to 400 words) woth 100 points each and 150 points for discussion which came from reading articles that Evan assigned and writing 4 questions about them to discuss in class. Evan and the professor were really lenient graders on the midterms and discussion assignments, so as long as you kept up with lectures you were pretty solid. The midterms did require you to know quite a bit from the assigned readings in the textbook and from some of the articles we would read for discussion, so I would recommend staying on top of those to succeed in the class.