Just like traditional on-campus classes, Penn LPS Online courses emphasize communication and connection with instructors as well as peers. Our courses are designed and delivered by Penn faculty who bring years of teaching experience as well as professional expertise to the classroom. The Faculty Spotlight series aims to introduce you to some of the outstanding instructors who make our courses so immersive and effective. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Meet Jane Dmochowski
Dr. Jane Dmochowski is a senior lecturer in the Earth and Environmental Science Department at Penn. She previously served as the managing director of Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) and Associate Director of Undergraduate Programs in Earth and Environmental Science at Penn. Currently, she teaches courses in subjects including remote sensing and environmental case studies. She also advises first-year students and conducts research with undergraduate and master’s students. In 2026, she received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty.
At Penn LPS Online, Dr. Dmochowski teaches CLCH 1600: Oceanography, a course that is often taken as an introduction to the Certificate in Climate Science and to the Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences (for which it fulfills the foundational degree requirement for Scientific Process).
Congratulations on the teaching award! What does receiving this distinction mean to you?
It feels really good. There are many exceptional instructors at Penn, and getting an award requires people to nominate and write letters for you. I’m grateful that I have supporters who are willing to do that for me.
How would you describe your approach to teaching?
I used to really pride myself on being a good lecturer. I still feel like lecturing is an important element of engaging students, to show them your own enthusiasm and ignite their curiosity. But I try to avoid too much passive learning. Students can do a pretty good job of getting the basics outside of class on their own, reading, looking at videos or other material online. My role is to foster interaction and challenge students to engage in higher-order learning, moving beyond basic facts to analyze and synthesize new information. So we hold debates, town hall meetings, and we create things, like strategic plans for the environmental cases. This approach empowers students to not only comprehend the course material, but also effectively apply it.
Is there anything you do differently when teaching an online asynchronous course?
When teaching online, it is just as important to encourage interactions. And it is definitely more challenging to do so in an online class, but it can be done through discussion boards, Zoom break-out rooms, and group work. These things are more successful if they’re really structured, so I put a lot of work into defining what exactly students are going to be doing, so that everyone understands the task, the learning objectives and their expected contribution. Then there’s motivation to have the pre-class work done before you come to class or Zoom, or start the group assignment, because peers depend on one another in collaborative work.
And because online classes are so accessible, students in the class are not just interacting with people who are identical to them. They are interacting with other students from all over Philadelphia, and even all over the world, and they often bring diverse perspectives and backgrounds. Being able to learn from anyone around the world is such an incredible gift—that is something I would never have been able to imagine as an undergraduate.
CLCH 1600: Oceanography in particular brings a lot of students together. It’s a Gateway course, so you may have adult students who are returning to the classroom for the first time after a long period away. It’s also a certificate course, so some students may already have undergraduate or even graduate degrees. How do you address that, as an instructor?
I truly believe that no matter where or what you teach, there will be spectrum of student expectations and prior experiences in the class. I've taught at community colleges, I've taught at much smaller four-year colleges, and I’ve taught in Penn LPS. But most of my experience has been with Penn School of Arts and Sciences undergrads. Some might think the College students would be a more homogeneous student population, who all know the same things and have the same motivations. And that's never true.
So it’s always my goal to think about how an individual student has progressed, not how they compare to their peers, but how they grow, whether they show improvement at the end of the course. It might be more challenging with a greater range of backgrounds and ages and experiences with higher education, but I have to think about that range in any class. I always want to see learning, not just taking in information and regurgitating it.
How can new students set themselves up for success in your course?
Every student should always focus on learning. I try to instill this in my children, too. I think that we often want to think about how we're going to be assessed, because the grade is what we have to show afterward for whatever we did, and there’s no way to get around that. But when students let go and say, “I'm just going to try to learn this material,” they're going to be happier, and they really will learn a lot more.
What do you think students will enjoy about learning oceanography?
Learning about the history of our global ocean essentially gives you the whole picture. We are the Blue Planet; Earth’s surface is primarily ocean. There are also so many different things you can learn within oceanography: it's chemistry, it's math, it's physics, it’s geology, it's geophysics, it’s everything. That’s part of what I love about it.
The ocean has a huge impact on the climate—and our climate has a big impact on the ocean, and us. Understanding oceanography is a great place to start before you get into the nitty-gritty of climate change or atmospheric science. When students see the vast temporal scale of the Milankovitch cycles and how the Earth's climate changes naturally over very long periods of time, and then they see the very short time scale of our most recent accelerated rise in CO2, that is often a bit of a light bulb moment.
Learn more about our climate science courses in the Penn LPS Online feature: Ready to make an impact? 5 reasons to pursue a Certificate in Climate Change.
You can also read about the new Advanced Certificate in Strategic Climate Communication (to which CLCH 1600: Oceanography can be applied).
Visit our Faculty Spotlight page to meet more of the outstanding instructors who make our courses so immersive and effective.
