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Several surveys have been drafted rather than attempting a "one size fits all" approach.
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Potential Users Survey
In August of 1998 a survey was posted at the home page of the Virtual Geosciences Professor. Since that time about 1,200 individuals have loaded the survey page and more than 300 responses have been returned by e-mail; approximately 200 are teaching geosciences at the college level.
The VirtualCoffeeRoom is a forum for faculty, staff and students interested in exploring the potential of the Internet in the creation of learning environments. The listserv has been in existence since April, 1997 and has 216 subscribers (approximately 80% in the U.S.) as of February, 2000). The archives of the Listserv are public.
Mark Francek, Central Michigan University, maintains a mailing list called Earth Science Site of the Week that is distributed to about 300 earth science educators. He has agreed to distribute the URLs of the surveys to his mailing list.
The subscribers to these three lists (about 700 total) will be sent the URLs for the Potential Users and Potential Contributors Surveys. Please suggest additional lists that you have access to.
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Potential Contributors Survey
The Virtual Geoscience Professor web site has been maintained since July, 1996. The site now includes links to nearly 3,800 Internet-based resources for the geosciences. Approximately 200 (7%) of these resources have been recognized as exemplifying good practices. A good practice site is one recommended for someone to explore if they are interested in seeing how their peers were using Internet-based resources and multimedia in their courses.
In addition, many of the subscribers to the VirtualCoffeeRoom and Earth Science Site of the Week (mentioned above) will feel qualified to respond to the Potential Contributors Survey.
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Chairs Survey
Approximately 400 geoscience departments in North America have active home pages and more than 200 departments have at least one individual producing Internet-based course resources. Each of these 200 chairs will receive a Chairs Survey that will focus on how they currently set and evaluate the teaching expectation for their faculty and on what they would need to know about DLESE in order to evaluate the selection process.
The Survey Process
Results will be tabulated and preliminanry recommendations will be made during the summer and distributed to the Collections Committee and the Steering Committee. A focus group is planned for the GSA Annual Meetings in Reno, Nevada in early November, 2000. The purpose of the focus group is to refine our thoughts on the whole question of academic recognition. If deemed useful, a repeat focus group could be held in conjunction with the AGU meetings in San Francisco in December, 2000.
A final set of recommendations will be delivered to the Collections Committee and the Steering Committee by the end of January, 2001.
The survey process began in mid-April, 2000 so that we could catch faculty prior to the end of the academic year and before the summer field seasons start. More than 75% of the returns arrived after one week of notification. A thank you was sent to all those contacted at the beginning of week two along with a reminder that there was still time to respond. Approximately 10% of the total responses were received after the reminder.
Summary of Survey Results
You may down load rich-text format documents that summarize the survey responses and written comments.
