Introduction to Biology — Syllabus
Introduction to Biology is a 4-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The 4 units are 3 of lecture and 1 of lab. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times]. The fourth unit is the weekly Biology Lab & Inquiry, a hands-on lab of about two hours that you run on a free simulation, a virtual microscope, or a simple at-home protocol.
This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.
Instructor and Contact
- Instructor: [Instructor name]
- Contact: [Contact info]
- Office hours: [Office hours]
Bring a specific question to office hours, such as a process whose steps keep trading places in your head or a Punnett square that will not come out right, and reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for exam week. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.
Course Description
This is the cell-and-molecular first semester of the two-semester sequence taken by biology majors and by students on pre-health, nursing, and allied-health paths. It assumes high-school biology and chemistry as background. It teaches the biologist's way of thinking: define a variable so it can be measured, and test a claim against a control; read a structure for the job it does, because structure determines function; trace matter and energy through a cell; hold the order of a process as a fact, not a suggestion; and put a number on biology's quantitative questions with every step shown.
The course moves in a clear arc, the method and the chemistry before the cell, and the cell before its energy, its division, and its molecules. It opens with the science of biology: what makes something alive, how life is organized from atom to biosphere, how a controlled experiment tests an idea, and evolution by natural selection as the unifying framework of biology. It then turns to the chemistry of life and the four classes of macromolecules, the cell and its membrane, and the energy arc of enzymes, cellular respiration, and photosynthesis, with the midterm as a checkpoint in Week 8. The second half takes up the cell cycle and mitosis, meiosis, Mendelian genetics and the patterns of inheritance that bend Mendel's simple rules, the structure and copying of DNA, gene expression from DNA to protein, and, as the synthesis, gene regulation, mutation, and the tools of biotechnology.
Two habits carry the whole course. Every time you meet a process, you say its stages in order and name the place in the cell where each one runs. Every time you meet a number, you show each step of the arithmetic and end with one plain sentence about what the number means. The course's recurring quantitative questions are the tenfold step of the pH scale, the surface-area-to-volume ratio, the mitotic index, the 2ⁿ count of chromosome combinations, monohybrid and dihybrid ratios with the product rule, Chargaff's rules, and reading a codon table.
This is an introductory course, not biochemistry, genetics, or anatomy and physiology. Respiration and photosynthesis are taught as ordered overviews, not enzyme by enzyme; there is no enzyme kinetics, no recombination mapping, and no promoter or splicing detail. Evolution, biodiversity, and ecology belong to the second semester of the sequence; here evolution appears as the framework that ties biology together and as the lens on variation.
A note on evolution and on gene editing
Evolution by natural selection is taught as the discipline teaches it: the unifying framework of biology, with its evidence stated, such as the near-universal genetic code and the cell machinery living things share. The one place the course presents open questions as open is Week 15. Biotechnology and gene editing raise real ethical questions, and the course presents the case for and the case for caution at full strength, draws the line between editing body cells and editing cells that pass to the next generation, and prescribes no verdict. No grade depends on which view you hold.
Required Materials
You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need:
- Free virtual labs and a spreadsheet: the weekly Biology Lab & Inquiry links the free simulations and interactives it uses (PhET, HHMI BioInteractive, and Learn.Genetics), a virtual microscope, and a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet) for the data tables. A calculator, or pencil and paper, works for checking the arithmetic by hand.
- Common household materials for the at-home labs: for example a penny and dish soap, half a red cabbage and a few kitchen liquids, iodine solution, a raw potato and household hydrogen peroxide, a packet of dry yeast and some balloons, spinach leaves and baking soda, and strawberries with rubbing alcohol. Each lab page lists exactly what it needs, and every at-home lab prints illustrative data you can work from if you cannot run the protocol.
- A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.
Lab safety at home
Several at-home labs use ordinary household materials that still call for care. Do not taste, eat, or drink anything used in a lab. Keep iodine, hydrogen peroxide, and rubbing alcohol away from your eyes and mouth, and away from children and pets. Keep rubbing alcohol away from any flame. Take care with boiling water and hot liquids, and keep a lamp at a heat-safe distance. Throw every tested sample away afterward and wash up when you finish. If you cannot run a protocol safely where you live, use the illustrative data the lab page prints instead; the lab is graded on your method, your arithmetic, and your reasoning, not on your own counts matching anyone else's.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- Outcome A. Scientific reasoning — form a testable hypothesis, design and critique a controlled experiment, collect and organize data in a table, show every step of a quantitative calculation, and interpret biological data to evaluate claims about living systems.
- Outcome B. Structure, function, and process — connect a biological structure to its function, state a process as an ordered sequence with its cellular locations, and trace how matter and energy move through cells and across levels of biological organization.
The eight course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's Start Here page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.
- Describe the practice of science in biology — the characteristics of life as a set, the levels of biological organization, the scientific method and a controlled experiment's variables and control, and the difference between a hypothesis and a theory — and explain evolution by natural selection as the unifying framework of biology.
- Explain the chemistry of life — atoms and the three kinds of chemical bonds, water's polarity and the properties it produces, and the logarithmic pH scale with buffers — and relate the structure of each of the four classes of biological macromolecules (carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nucleic acids) to its function.
- Compare prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, relate each eukaryotic organelle to its function, explain how substances cross the plasma membrane by passive and active transport (including osmosis and tonicity), and use the surface-area-to-volume ratio to explain why cells stay small.
- Explain how cells obtain and transform energy — the laws of thermodynamics, ATP, and enzyme action with its temperature and pH limits — and trace cellular respiration and photosynthesis as ordered, located overviews, including fermentation and the relationship between the two processes.
- Describe the eukaryotic cell cycle and the ordered phases of mitosis, compute a mitotic index, contrast mitosis with meiosis, and explain how crossing over, independent assortment, and fertilization generate genetic variation, including the 2ⁿ count.
- Apply the principles of inheritance — segregation, independent assortment, the product rule, monohybrid, test, and dihybrid crosses, and the extensions of Mendel (incomplete dominance, codominance, multiple alleles, sex linkage, linkage, pedigrees) — to predict the outcomes of genetic crosses as probabilities.
- Explain the structure and semiconservative replication of DNA, apply Chargaff's rules and complementary base pairing, and trace gene expression through transcription and translation with the genetic code (the central dogma), decoding a sequence from template to protein.
- Describe how gene expression is regulated (the lac operon as the model), classify mutations and their effects, and explain what the core biotechnology tools do — PCR, gel electrophoresis, recombinant DNA, and CRISPR-Cas9 — including the ethical questions gene editing raises, weighed evenhandedly.
How this course works
Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through as well.
A typical week runs in this order:
- Start Here. Open the week's module overview. It lists the week's items in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
- Chapter (about 35 to 45 minutes). The week's primary reading. Read it first.
- Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
- Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
- Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a summary you submit.
- Practice set (about 20 minutes). Ungraded practice with a coach, at your own pace.
- Biology Lab & Inquiry (about 2 hours). The week's idea tested by hand: you write a hypothesis, follow a step-by-step procedure on a free simulation, a virtual microscope, a supplied figure, or a simple at-home protocol, fill in a data table with the arithmetic shown, explain the result in words, and then catch and correct a slip your chatbot makes on the same data.
- Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's ideas to work on a real question.
- Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.
Week 8 is lighter: the chapter, lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. Its one piece of new material is the order-and-location habit: for any process, name the stages in order and the place each one runs. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, practice exam, and exam-prep tutorial.
Grading
Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Tutorials & Practice | 10% |
| Quizzes | 10% |
| Workshops | 20% |
| Assignments | 25% |
| Discussions | 15% |
| Exams | 20% |
| Total | 100% |
What each group holds
- Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, 5 points each. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
- Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, 10 points each, in every module except Week 8.
- Workshops: the 14 weekly Biology Lab & Inquiry labs, 50 points each, in every module except Week 8.
- Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, 100 points each, in every module except Week 8.
- Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, 10 points each, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
- Exams: the midterm in Week 8 (50 points) and the cumulative final in Week 16 (100 points).
Each week's discussion and assignment ship in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group, for the same points.
Letter grades follow the standard scheme:
| Letter | Percentage range |
|---|---|
| A | 90–100 |
| B | 80–89 |
| C | 70–79 |
| D | 60–69 |
| F | below 60 |
Weekly Schedule
The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the Start Here page, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are graded and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.
| Week | Focus | Lecture page | Graded and published | Traditional alternative (unpublished) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Science of Biology | Lecture: The Science of Biology | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 2 | The Chemistry of Life | Lecture: The Chemistry of Life | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 3 | Biological Macromolecules | Lecture: Biological Macromolecules | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 4 | Cell Structure & Function | Lecture: Cell Structure & Function | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 5 | Energy, Enzymes & Metabolism | Lecture: Energy, Enzymes & Metabolism | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 6 | Cellular Respiration | Lecture: Cellular Respiration | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 7 | Photosynthesis | Lecture: Photosynthesis | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 8 | Midterm Review & Exam | Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam | Adaptive discussion, midterm exam | Discussion |
| 9 | The Cell Cycle & Mitosis | Lecture: The Cell Cycle & Mitosis | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 10 | Meiosis & Sexual Reproduction | Lecture: Meiosis & Sexual Reproduction | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 11 | Mendelian Genetics | Lecture: Mendelian Genetics | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 12 | Patterns of Inheritance | Lecture: Patterns of Inheritance | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 13 | DNA Structure & Replication | Lecture: DNA Structure & Replication | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 14 | Gene Expression | Lecture: Gene Expression | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 15 | Gene Regulation, Mutation & Biotechnology | Lecture: Gene Regulation, Mutation & Biotechnology | Tutorial, Biology Lab & Inquiry, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 16 | Finals week (no module) | None | Final exam | None |
The midterm in Week 8 covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 4. The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on every course objective: the practice of science and evolution as biology's framework (Objective 1), the chemistry of life and the macromolecules (Objective 2), the cell, its membrane, and transport (Objective 3), energy, enzymes, respiration, and photosynthesis (Objective 4), the cell cycle, mitosis, and meiosis (Objective 5), inheritance and its extensions (Objective 6), DNA structure, replication, and gene expression (Objective 7), and gene regulation, mutation, and biotechnology (Objective 8). Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot.
Attendance and Participation
This course meets in person twice a week, and the weekly lab adds about two hours of hands-on work. Come to class having opened the week's Start Here page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with figures, worked examples, and questions. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Biology Lab & Inquiry, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each week builds on the vocabulary and the processes of the weeks before it, so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips; keep to the weekly rhythm and talk to your instructor the moment you feel lost. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its Start Here page so you stay on pace.
Late Work
Late work loses 10% of the item's points for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.
Academic Integrity
The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a course built on evidence, integrity also means honest data: every number in a lab table must be one you measured, one the lab page supplied, or one you computed and showed. Three violations matter most in this course: presenting an invented measurement, study, or figure as real, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.
Accessibility and Disability
This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. Figures, gels, and pedigrees are described in words as well as drawn. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.
AI-Use Policy
This course uses an AI chatbot as a study partner, and then asks you to check its work against the evidence. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.
AI may be used on these activities:
- Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
- Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach.
- Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
- Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You work the problems with a chatbot coach that scores your work against the assignment's rubric, then submit the self-scored report and the conversation share link.
- Biology Lab & Inquiry (a required AI-critique step). After your own work, you paste your data table, cross, or sequence into your chatbot with the week's interpretation prompt, then catch, explain, and correct a slip in its answer by hand against the course's rules, such as a process's steps put out of order, mitosis confused with meiosis, a garbled genetics ratio, a mislabeled structure, an over-simplified mechanism, or an invented figure.
- Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.
AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can read a structure for its job, put a process in order, and work a quantitative question.
A chatbot is not a source. It can explain a term or quiz you on a process, but it routinely puts the citric acid cycle in the wrong place, says mitosis makes four cells, reports a phenotype ratio as 1:2:1, or mis-adds a column of three trials. Every number, label, and order you submit must trace to your own data, the course's pinned values, or a real source, checked by you.
If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.
Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.
Bring your own AI: access, cost, and privacy
- Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same points, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
- Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
- Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, including health details about yourself or your family, and remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.
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