USING THE WEB TO LINK PHYSICAL AND REGIONAL GEOLOGY IN STUDENTS’ MINDS

Physical Geology is no longer a pre-requisite for Pacific Northwest Geology in many Washington State community and technical colleges. As a result, many students who enroll in the course are unfamiliar with basic geologic principles and materials. A new online class in Pacific Northwest Geology enables students to grasp the basic concepts and gain in-depth knowledge of the historical geology of the Northwest. The course, developed with support from the WashingtonOnline consortium, has received high marks from students with no geology background and from those who have previously taken a physical geology course. The process of creating and teaching the course offers lessons in designing a course that addresses varying levels of student preparedness. (1) Successful learning in an online course requires intensive communication, discussion, and feedback between students and instructor and among the students. In the Pacific Northwest Geology course, communications include online discussion designed to engage and sustain student interest in the topics, weekly summaries by students of their learning experiences, and written feedback from the instructor on graded lab answers. The result is thoughtful communication and feedback that fosters a student’s detailed observation, analysis and application of geologic principles as he or she constructs meaning for the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest. (2) The interlinked nature of the course’s website lends itself well to a multi-tiered approach to learning geology, in which the student can switch back and forth online between lecture, lab, basics of physical geology, focus pages on detailed aspects of the regional geology, an extensive glossary, and outside websites. (3) Students respond well to “virtual field sites” that require them to engage critically and analytically with geologic evidence from the real world.