Hi Everyone, I have received a lot of helpful and insightful suggestions-thanks so much to everyone who responded.
I probably should have clarified that the class is a beginning 1-credit freshman-level weed ID course mostly taken by agricultural science majors. Most of the students will not be going to graduate school. The main objective is to familiarize the students with a standard list of about 100 common weed species that they will likely encounter in their careers in the agricultural field. For the most part they will be collecting plants we study in class, so they really should know the ID characteristics ahead of time. I am really not expecting a very high level of scholarship or detail. The point is just to get them out in the field looking at these plants and seeing if they can correctly identify them. Most of the identification will be very basic and simple. >From the responses so far I think I could easily overcome plagiarism concerns. The real issue is if students would have access to quality cameras that would allow for high resolution photos needed to document key features. That is something I will have to consider. I like the idea of using dissecting scopes to take close-up shots. Also I wasn't really thinking about posting the photos to a website. I know that lots of these sites exist. I guess it would depend on the quality but I am not expecting the quality to such that the photos would have wider use (although that would be nice). Perhaps occasionally a student might do an especially great job and I could then post the pictures to such a site. Anyway, thanks again to everyone who responded. If decide to be brave and give this a try I will post again to report the results. Cheers! Greta
