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 Mike Kane
Dr. Mike Kane is a senior lecturer in the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program in Penn Arts and Sciences. For the past ten years, he has taught neuroscience courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Penn, he taught at Temple University and Penn State Abington. Prior to going into full-time teaching, he completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Bay Pines Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Florida and at the Wayne State School of Medicine in Michigan. Dr. Kane earned his undergraduate degree in psychology at Penn State University and his PhD in Neuroscience in the fields of neurogenetics and neurodevelopment from the University of California, Los Angeles.
At Penn, Dr. Kane teaches several courses in the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program, including Introduction to Brain and Behavior, Drugs, Brain, and Mind, Laboratory of Animal Behavior, Animal Models of Psychiatric Disorders, and Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology. In 2024, he was presented with the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty in Neuroscience. For Penn LPS Online, Dr. Kane teaches NEUR 1000: Introduction to Neuroscience, the required first course in the Certificate in Neuroscience.
Congratulations on the Arts and Sciences teaching award!
Thank you. You know, if you had told me 20 years ago that I’d be in this position, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. I was really into research and practical applications at the time, looking into biotech and the pharmaceutical industry. But things changed for me when I was a graduate student mentoring undergraduates in the lab. The most transformative experience was when I had the chance to be a teaching assistant for one of the undergraduate neuroscience courses for UCLA, and seeing how you can build and nurture relationships with students and watch their intellectual and personal growth in real time. The award recognition is just a bonus.
How would you describe your approach to teaching?
I come to the classroom with a lot of energy and passion. You have to bring high energy on a regular basis, especially in large lecture halls, to keep students engaged and wanting to learn more. Another strategy that I’ve employed is to bring in real world examples and current events. The field of neuroscience is constantly evolving; there are new discoveries with respect to diseases, drugs, and therapies on almost a daily basis, and I’ve learned that students really embrace that. They read in a textbook about a particular process in the nervous system, maybe a particular receptor that we’re learning about, and then they learn about a new drug that could target that receptor to lead to a change in behavior—to, let’s say, reduce depression or increase memory performance in an Alzheimer’s patient. To bring that into the classroom really brings the material to life.
Is there anything you do differently for an online course like NEUR 1000: Introduction to Neuroscience?
With the online course, the goal was to break down each chapter into “submodules”, and then create 5-10 minute video content and accompanying PowerPoint slides for each of these. The submodules allow people to focus their attention for shorter amounts of time. That’s been very effective and has informed my in-person teaching. Instructors will tell you that student attention drops off precipitously after a certain amount of time and you're just not going to be able to maintain everybody's attention for a full 90 minutes. So, creating these small, targeted submodules for the online class has changed my approach in the larger classroom setting.
In Introduction to Neuroscience, we review a lot of material in 8 weeks. We have weekly quizzes that follow up on the material in the chapters we discussed for the week. We have weekly problem sets, which are more response driven. There are also three midterm exams, which are the same format as the quizzes, but are the level of difficulty of the problem sets. And then there are weekly discussion boards. That’s where people really take the ideas we discuss and run with them. They see a concept or topic that was mentioned in the lecture, and then they’ll post about an experience they had—personal or academic or other—and reference literature that supports their response. It’s always really fun for me to see how the material resonates with students from diverse backgrounds.
Introduction to Neuroscience is unusual among Penn LPS Online courses in that students have to complete a pre-course learning assessment before they can start the course. Why is that?
This course is also a little unusual in that some of the hardest material comes first. The foundation of neuroscience is neuronal signaling, which involves concepts such as the resting membrane potential and action potential. These topics involve ions, or charged particles, and the movement of these charged particles across biological membranes. There are a lot of terms from physics, math, chemistry, and biology that go into these concepts. So, the diagnostic or learning assessment module has a biology section, a chemistry section, a math section, and a physics section. This gives students the opportunity to test their knowledge within each of these realms, and then also provides them feedback and additional resources to enhance their knowledge, if needed.
How can a new student set themselves up for success in Introduction to Neuroscience?
Time management and organization are key. Even though we have these submodules designed to be digested in a short amount of time, it’s not the kind of course where you can just set aside two hours a week to watch the lecture videos and then complete the quizzes and problem sets. It’s something that you need to tackle on a near daily basis, especially in the accelerated 8-week term. I recommend starting each week by allocating enough time to read the textbook chapters in a rigorous way, not just skimming. Then work through each of the videos for the submodules, then go back and review that material, then attack the chapter quizzes and problem sets, and so on. It’s a process, but students will reap the benefits and have a solid foundation for when they move into the next level courses.
Neuroscience doesn’t come naturally. I tell my students all the time: it’s a new language. You’re going to learn a whole new set of terminology, which may be confusing or not meaningful at first. As you proceed through each week of the material, the same terminology comes up over and over again, and it will make sense to you eventually. Everything becomes more natural within this field through repetition, and it’s only through repetition that you build synaptic connections in the brain.
That’s interesting. Many students revisit course material and rewatch lecture recordings, but I didn’t know that reviewing helps build synaptic connections! Do your students learn about the process of learning in the course?
Learning and memory could be its own entire course. In terms of the molecular process, we don’t discuss that too much. But I will say that, more generally, I’ve had a number of students who have really surprised themselves with the time and effort they were able to put into the class. Especially adult learners, who have not been in the classroom for many years, and were surprised that they could get through the course through sheer hard work when they may not have had to tap that resource for a long time.
Who are the adult students who take Introduction to Neuroscience?
In the five years I’ve taught this course, we’ve had students with a high school science background all the way through practicing physicians, and everyone in between. We always have a number of mental health professionals in the course: therapists, social workers, and other mental health practitioners who really want to have a deeper understanding of brain function.
What the brain can do and why it works that way is, I think, an intriguing question for anybody. How does the visual system work? Why do we see in color and not in black and white? How can I hear different sounds? Why did I lose smell when I had Covid? A lot of these everyday things that we take for granted, that are part and parcel of being human, can be explained by some aspect of brain function. And there are so many people from so many backgrounds who come together to study this field and seek out new knowledge. And that’s what I’m here to do: to help facilitate and guide them to that new knowledge.
Learn more about the Certificate in Neuroscience courses in Your mind at work: Applying neuroscience in the classroom and outside of the lab.
Visit our Faculty Spotlight page to meet more of the outstanding instructors who make our courses so immersive and effective.
