TEACHING AN ENVIRONMENTAL GEOLOGY LECTURE AND LAB COURSE ONLINE

There is an increasing demand for online science courses as a result of increased offerings of online degree programs at colleges and universities. More powerful and rapidly changing web-based applications, learning management systems, and webcams allow effective digital teaching of geoscience courses online that are perfectly suited to take advantage of this increased demand. Teaching online geoscience courses provides an opportunity to increase science literacy in diverse audiences of traditional and non-traditional students using engaging and real-world technologies to develop lab activities, virtual field trips, and assignments. These activities, field trips, and assignments may not be available in traditional, in-person lecture/lab courses due to the lack of funding, computers, and/or appropriate facilities. Increasing science literacy and the number of science majors is important in this time of declining performance of U. S. students on science tests relative to the rest of the world.

I developed and taught the online version of Environmental Geology/Environmental Geology Lab (GEOL 1500/1500L) to provide an online offering that fulfills the natural science with a lab general education requirement for a baccalaureate degree at Youngstown State University (YSU). The online version of GEOL 1500/1500L is the first and only 100% web-based science with a lab course offered at YSU. I took advantage of web-based applications (including Gapminder World, Google Earth, Virtual Earthquake, and Virtual River), YouTube, and webcams that are available free online to create inquiry-based lab activities, virtual field trips, and assignments. Using web-based applications together with Blackboard provided an engaging, virtual learning environment.

Student reactions were positive on course evaluations and surveys indicating they thought the lab activities, field trips, and assignments were engaging and made learning geoscience interesting and fun. Student grades on lab activities, assignments, exams, and the course suggested that the methods used in this course increased science literacy and student interest in geoscience.