Chairs Survey
Our goal is to design and implement a Digital library for Earth System Education that serves educators and students of all types, at all grade levels, and in all locations, by facilitating a new era of sharing of resources.

The Earth science education community has started to make DLESE a reality. With support from NSF and NASA, a community workshop "Portals to the Future: A Digital Library for Earth System Education" has developed an initial vision and action plan. A pilot project, the Geoscience Digital Library has been funded by NSF as part of the national digital library movement to develop a prototype model. DLESE is a growing, evolving entity with a primary mission to serve the needs of learners and educators in all of the Earth sciences at all levels of instruction.

As a chair of a geosciences department you are intimately involved with the evaluation of faculty accomplishments. What can the organizers of DLESE do to communicate the peer review processes that underlie the selection of resources to appear in the DLESE collections?

Please take a few minutes to complete the following survey. .

If you would like more information, please register as a member of the DLESE community. You can also subscribe to a number of e-mail services in an area of personal interest.

Respondent

  1. Gender :

  2. Institution :

  3. Public or Private Institution

  4. Faculty Rank :

At My Institution

  1. At my institution individuals can select between a Research Track or a Teaching Track. Each track has its own weighting scheme for expectations in teaching, research and service.

  2. At my institution all faculty have about the same expectations for accomplishments in research, teaching and service. In our case the balance is about:

      Research

      Teaching

      Service

  3. Non-tenured faculty colleagues are encouraged to spend time preparing Internet and other multimedia resources for their courses.

  4. Our primary source of information used in evaluating teaching are student surveys conducted at or near the end of the course.

  5. All our mandatory review processes of faculty performance require that each faculty member submit a "teaching portfolio" that includes representative samples of materials developed and methods used in developing and conducting classes. Internet-based resources and other multimedia resources can be included in the portfolio.

  6. The efforts of my faculty colleagues to enhance learning are fairly taken into consideration in our review processes.

  7. With respect to the production of Internet and multimedia resources, what is the single biggest obstacle your faculty face on your campus?

  8. With respect to the production of Internet and multimedia resources, what is the second biggest obstacle your faculty face on your campus?

the Digital Library for Earth System Education

  1. There is a need for "peer review" of Internet resources much as there is a "peer review" process for "formal" publications.

    The following criteria will be an integral part of the process of evaluation of the DLESE collection:

    1. Accuracy (as evaluated by scientists)
    2. Importance/Significance (of the resource as you would use it)
    3. Pedagogical Effectiveness. (Is there evidence that student learning has occurred?)
    4. Well Documented. (Data shall have metadata, lessons shall have rubrics, etc.)
    5. Ease of Use (for Both students and faculty)
    6. Inspirational or Motivational or Fun (for the student)
    7. Robustness/Sustainability (of the resource)

  2. Which single criterion would have the greatest impact on you as a chair of a faculty member who produced a resource selected for the DLESE collection?

  3. Which criterion would have the second greatest impact on you as a chair of a faculty member who produced a resource selected for the DLESE collection?

  4. I would encourage my faculty who have developed superior learning resources to consider putting them in an electronic form and submitting them for DLESE review.

  5. We believe that academic recognition should accrue to those whose resources are included in the DLESE collections. As an evaluator of a potential contributor to the Digital Library for Earth System Education, please share with us your thoughts on how we can best protect their intellectual contribution and communicate their efforts. Please include any selection criteria that we may have omitted and feel free to comment on the academic culture at your institution.

  6. E-mail address :

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