EARTH SCIENCES WITHIN INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY TRENDS AND MASSIVE OPEN COURSEWARE

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have shifted thinking of the broad education community in how digital resources are deployed in face to face, hybrid, and online learning. Based on Michael Zappa's Envisioning Technology graphic (2012), this session maps Earth Sciences with the future of instructional technology and the art of face to face teaching within the next five years. These pathways may further divide educators between specialists in digital resource creation and editing/mixing content, and specialists that focus on interpersonal and social experience of “labs”, mentoring, and coaching. This session explores current models of lecture, textbook, and online/hybrid learning and how they map to directions in inter-school teaching, achievements and badging, massive online courses/open courseware, and the role of “labs.”

While the focus of instructional technology and online/hybrid learning is often on intro level courses, these trends can help innovate upper-level and graduate teaching. Development of digital resources relies on open source or licensed platforms that permit faculty to self-develop interactive graphs, maps, and animations that are widely shareable in personalized learning. Second, inter-school teaching and MOOCs permit consortiums to develop videos and digital content learning modules on concepts and principles at both the intro and advanced course levels. Badging and achievement can anchor laboratories in a more prominent role as an instructor driven format where projects and open ended learning objectives require mentoring and expert peer assessment.

As students gain their knowledge base with personalized digital learning designed with less instructor interaction, within earth sciences, expert faculty can focus attention on designing and guiding students through more inquiry and project based lab instruction that a) preserve social aspects of learning and engagement b) integrates more students into research earlier and c) integrate students into ‘real world’ experiential learning. Formal textbooks/ebooks, role of large classrooms, course titles like "lecture" and "lab", the role of graduate students in teaching, and role of tenure track faculty in teaching should be expected to shift with these changes.