DEVELOPMENT AND ENHANCEMENT OF LABS FOR AN ONLINE INTRODUCTORY EARTH SCIENCE COURSE

Wayland Baptist University has been actively engaged in online teaching for many years. The first online science course offered at Wayland was EASC 1401, Earth Science 1, an equivalent of Physical Geology. The first classes were in the Spring of 2006 and six sections have been taught to date. EASC 1401 consists of 3 hours lecture and 1 hour lab credit. The lab component was the greatest challenge during the development and continued enhancement of this course. Initial planning called for the online labs to mirror those used in the “face-to-face” (F2F ) courses on campus. In some cases essentially the same lab was used for both.

Individual labs originally consisted of a minimum of 2 parts, a directions file and an answer file, both in MS Word format. These were deployed through the university's BlackBoard course management system. After completing the lab, students uploaded the answer file to the instructor who graded them using the “Track Changes” feature in MS Word and then returned them to the students. Grading in this manner proved to be very cumbersome; individual answer sheets that could be graded in a few minutes by hand took up to 30 minutes or more on the computer. This created a greater load for the instructor and increased the time before graded labs could be returned to students. Lab answer sheets have now been placed in BlackBoard as “quizzes” so the system automatically evaluates student work as it is completed. The professor always reviews all labs to verify the system grading is correct.

There are 10 labs in the course with one week allowed to complete each. Every lab is available two weeks in advance of their due date. The labs cover typical introductory topics such as minerals and rocks, geologic time, plate tectonics, etc. Students are required to purchase a lab kit which contains rock/mineral specimens, testing materials and maps. Additional materials, such as maps, photographs and models are available for download. The course now makes use of many more Web resources than the F2F classes, such as Virtual Earthquake, USGS “realtime” data, and online tutorials. More internet components, such as virtual fieldtrips, are being developed as we try to build on the strengths of the online environment.