DESIGNING A SEDIMENTARY GEOLOGY COURSE TO ACHIEVE SPECIFIC LEARNING GOALS: IF YOU BUILD IT, THE CONTENT WILL COME!

When we design and teach a course, we all hope that our teaching will have an impact on how students think and solve problems. We probably also hope that a certain amount of critical content is ‘mastered' in some meaningful and measureable way. We contend that it is possible to move from ‘hoping' to nearly ‘assuring' that these ends will be met if the goals of the course are stated clearly at the outset, before the course is designed, and that these goals are sufficiently specific and well-defined as to be measureable. Critical content necessarily will follow from well-stated goals. In a sedimentary geology course, it is first imperative to define the course's context: is it a sedimentology course? A stratigraphy course? A combined sed/strat course? What is the class size? What are departmental expectations? Setting an overarching goal for the course provides clarity and a touchstone for the instructor and students, a reference point by which all course planning decisions are measured. For example: “Students should be able to interpret the depositional environment(s) of a sedimentary sequence in the field, from measured sections, or other representations of the rocks, and hypothesize about the relative roles of sediment supply, base level, or subsidence in generating this sedimentary sequence.” Ancillary goals—such as improving student's quantitative skills or technical writing ability-- should also be stated early in the course design process. We have found that, after these goals are clearly defined, it becomes a far easier (and more creative and enjoyable) process to select appropriate course content and to design a course that will achieve the goals. Most importantly, the course plan is wholly focused on giving students the practice (read: repetition) they need to solve problems in sedimentary geology as defined by the overarching goal(s). In this presentation, we intend to illustrate this process of course design using a sedimentary geology course as an example and to show that (a) different course goals may lead to a very different course design and format and (b) that many different course formats can be used to achieve the same goal(s).