Good Learning Practices in the Geosciences

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Good Practices - On-Line Geoscience Courses

Although the vast majority of Internet-based resources are designed as supplements and compliments to formal classroom instruction, there are several wholly on-line courses. If the production of such a course is your goal, you should take the time to go through as many examples as you can.

1. The Earth and its Neighbors in Space
   California State University @ Bakersfield. "Scientific method and discovery in the study of stars, planets, weather, rivers, glaciers, oceans, rocks, volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, mountains, drifting continents, the earth in time."

2. Gems and Precious Stones
   University of Wisconsin at Madison. "This site provides an integrated body of information about gems and gemstones. Materials cover general topics central to gemology, mineralogy, and geology; with lectures and visual materials covering diamonds and diamond simulants, rubies, sapphires, varieties of beryl (e.g., emerald), and other precious and semi-precious stones (18 lectures, links to sites providing supporting information, hundreds of images and diagrams)."

3. Environmental Problem Solving
   Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis." In this course, you will develop skills that will make you more comfortable in recognizing problems that can be solved (the meaning of "solved" will become clear) and in making sense of the quantitative information that we are flooded with in the media. Environmental problems are used as sources of material for the quantitative analyses because they are both important and interesting. "

4. Oceanography
   U. Houston. In the fall semester the instructor will teach one formal lecture section of the lecture and laboratory and one Internet-based section of lecture and laboratory. Data gathered during the semester may help address the issue of the value added by the Internet to the creation of a learning environment.

One of the easiest ways to begin is to put your favorite classroom or homework exercises on the Internet. Often, such exercises can standalone and, as such, can be of some utility to other instructors or students. A few examples follow along with a link to a catalog of laboratory exercises. Many of the exercises that follow are not "interactive". They are included to give the readers ideas for the development of their own exercises.

1. A Tale of Two Planets: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Landslides, and Floods on Earth and Mars
   California State University @ Bakersfield. These self-contained exercises are cast in a frames format.

2. Topographic Maps
   Clavert College. "Two exercises are included on this map, and this screen will serve as an index to the individual exercises. The lower box provides a link to an exercise on scale reading. The middle box leads to exercise in reading contour lines. And the upper box represents an exercise on flood-plain analysis that is still in the works".

3. Thematic Maps
   Occidental College. "From this page, you can access various thematic maps covering parts of Los Angeles County. These GIF images are derived from graphics created in COREL Draw by Prof. Scott Bogue (Geology, Occidental College). They are all based on maps originally compiled and drafted by Prof. James Sadd."

4. Oceanography Laboratories
   California State University @ San Jose."Sea water covers 71% of the earth's surface or 360 million square kilometers and composes 97% of the earth's water thus making our planet a unique body within our solar system. Several bodies in our solar system may have sheets of ice and one moon of Jupiter may have an ocean, but the extent and amount of sea water on earth is special. "

5. Landslides
   University of Cincinnati. " Landslides and mass movements involve the downslope movement of rock and/or soil and other surficial materials under the influence of gravity. Movement in landslides is generally rapid and takes place such that the center of gravity moves in a downward and outward direction. In this example, water-saturated bedrock and regolith fail along a curved surface and produce a landslide."

6. Flooding Exercise
   University of Cincinnati. "A flood is usually caused by a stream that has overflowed its banks during periods of high runoff. Floods occur when the water height or stage of a stream, commonly measured by a stream guage, passes some predetermined level, which is usually taken as the bank-full stage. When the stream channel can no longer accommodate the increased discharge it overflows its banks. This exercise is designed to explore the nature of floods and flood prediction. "

7. Physical Geology Lab
   from Texas A&M University. Power Point presentations covering the background needed for a Physical Geology laboratory course. This is a good resource for Teaching Assistants as well as for the students themselves

8. Volcano Project
   the University of Houston. These exercises are a mix of data gathering, obtaining information, and data synthesis. FIve separate exercises comprise this project along with a writing assignment.

9. Igneous Exercises
   University of Wyoming. A mixture of Internet-based and non Internet-based exercises for Physical Geology and/or petrology.

10. A Catalog of Geoscience Laboratory Exercises

1. Gravity Anomaly Over A Tunnel
   from the Colorado School of Mines

2. Effect of "bin width" on the Appearance of a Histogram
   a simple yet highly effective illustrator of an important concept.

3. Virtual Earthquake
   California State University @ Los Angeles. This appears to be one of the most widely used resource on the Internet.

4. Virtual Dating (of rocks!)
   California State University @ Los Angeles

5. The Virtual Laboratory
   More than 100 On-Line Physics Java Applets and VRML Resources

6. A Catalog of Geoscience Applets

1. Crystal Maker
   a Demo version of an application that should be part of the resources in every course in Mineralogy.

2. Earth System Resources
   Penn State University. " During 1994, the multimedia producers in the Deasy GeoGraphics Laboratory of our Department of Geography began a new project. Their goal was to produce a collection of short computer-based animations, images and models. These resources were designed to be used during lectures (using computer projection systems) by faculty members teaching Penn State's introductory earth science course."

3. Earth Moon Viewer
   You can view either a map of the Earth showing the day and night regions at this moment, or view the Earth from the Sun, the Moon, the night side of the Earth, above any location on the planet specified by latitude, longitude and altitude, from a satellite in Earth orbit, or above various cities around the globe.

4. MultiSpec
   "MultiSpec is being developed at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, by David Landgrebe and Larry Biehl from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and LARS. It results from an on-going multiyear research effort which is intended to define robust and fundamentally based technology for analyzing multispectral and hyperspectral image data, and to transfer this technology to the user community in as rapid a manner as possible. The results of the research are implemented into MultiSpec and made available to the user community via the download pages. MultiSpec© with its documentation© is distributed without charge." The lab MultiSpec Analysis of Crop Production is a good illustration of the use of MultiSpec.

5. Petroglyph
   Simulation of a petrographic microscope - from Bringam Young University

6. Petrographic Microscope
   UCLA - Extensive collection of images and optical properties

7. Shell Generator
   U. British Columbia. "The Interactive Accretionary Shell Model This program uses Raup's parameters to generate different shell shapes. You need a VRML PLUG-IN (e.g., Live 3-D of Netscape) to run this program. By modifying the parameters and pressing DRAW, you will generate a 3 dimensional shell. This shell can then be rotated, spun moved, etc. using your mouse button with the appropriate VRML command (click your right mouse button over the drawing for options)."

8. Stella Models
   from Carleton College

1. Earthquake Information
   from the USGS

2. Earthquake Watch
   from the USGS

3. Search for Historic Earthquakes
   IRIS

4. World Data Center A
   Education, Gravity, Magnetics, Topography among other topics

5. Sources of Geophysical Data
   Geophysics on the Internet, U. Houston

6. Current Volcanic Activity
   from Volcano World - on of the long-term geosciences resources on the Internet.

7. Data Viewer
   Columbia University