Lecture Plan: Glia

What this document is

This page is a build plan for an instructor assembling a lecture on this unit. It gives the slide sequence, per-slide timing, the points at which figures belong, and the speaker notes that carry the argument. It is a design document, not a rendered deck: there are no slides on this page to project, and nothing here is written to be shown to learners as it stands.

A separately maintained Marp deck for this unit does exist, and it is linked at the foot of this page under Rendered deck artifacts. That deck was authored in its own right and does not follow this plan slide for slide, so treat this page as the teaching design and the Marp file as one existing implementation of it. The learner-facing material is the unit page linked under Connections.

Session profile

• Audience: learners needing robust neuron-glia boundary decisions.
• Duration: 70 minutes lecture + 20 minutes morphology drill.
• Output: glia recognition checklist and adjudication log.

Slide-by-slide lecture plan

1. Slide 1 (2 min): Title and glia relevance
2. Slide 2 (5 min): Why glia are not “background”
3. Slide 3 (6 min): Class overview
   • Astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes.
4. Slide 4 (6 min): Morphological and contextual cues
5. Slide 5 (6 min): Vascular and myelin context interpretation
6. Slide 6 (6 min): Glia-neuron ambiguity classes
7. Slide 7 (7 min): Worked case I: perivascular flattened profile
   • Narrate the unit’s worked example (astrocyte endfoot vs. neurite at a capillary), reasoning visible.
8. Slide 8 (7 min): Worked case II: astrocyte process vs thin dendrite
   • From the glia-recognition library entry’s first worked example.
9. Slide 9 (6 min): Worked case III: OPC vs small neuron soma
   • From the glia-recognition library entry’s second worked example.
10. Slide 10 (5 min): QC metrics for glia labeling
11. Slide 11 (5 min): Escalation and second-pass review workflow
12. Slide 12 (5 min): Common failure patterns in practice
13. Slide 13 (5 min): Activity
    • classify and justify two ambiguous examples.
14. Slide 14 (5 min): Debrief and bridge to segmentation/proofreading.

Figure integration points

• Primary shortlist: course/units/figures/07-glia-selected-v1.md.
• Include one class comparison table and one ambiguity panel.

Speaker notes (expert-level)

• Stress glia corrections as high-value QC, not optional cleanup.
• Tie glia labeling errors to false neuronal connectivity inferences.

Assessment and artifacts

• Deliverable: glia checklist with evidence requirements.
• Rubric dimensions: class discrimination quality and uncertainty handling.

Connections

• Unit page: Glia
• Journal club: Technical Track Journal Club
• Dictionary: Connectomics Dictionary
• Existing module overlap: module04

Rendered deck artifacts