INTEGRATE: RETHINKING GEOSCIENCE INSTRUCTION WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREE CUSTOMIZABLE RESOURCES TO ADDRESS EARTH’S GRAND CHALLENGES IN INTRODUCTORY COURSES

Citizens of our increasingly crowded world will be confronted with future “grand challenges” such as depleted resources, sea level rise, a warmer climate, changing land use patterns and more extreme weather events. The geosciences provide critical insights that can help students develop the global perspective, cultural sensitivity, economic wisdom, and scientific acumen to inform their actions and address these challenges. Introductory geoscience courses provide a venue to bring this information before a wide and diverse audience of students.

The InTeGrate project (http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/index.html) has designed a new model for the development, testing, and dissemination of geoscience educational resources that can provide students with the skills and information necessary to understand, plan for, and attempt to mitigate these grand challenges. One of InTeGrate’s goals is to provide free, customizable, modular resources that have undergone rigorous testing and can be readily incorporated into a variety of introductory geoscience courses. To achieve this goal, we group teams of instructors from three different institutions (and institution types) with assessment experts and a robust, web-based content management system. Over two years, teams develop modules that explicitly address geoscience-related societal challenges, build interdisciplinary problem-solving skills, make use of real geoscience data, and incorporate geoscientific and systems thinking. Modules are reviewed against the InTeGrate design rubric, and piloted and assessed by the module authors in their classrooms. In addition, they are reviewed by content and pedagogy experts and revised prior to being published.

InTeGrate will launch three tested and peer-reviewed modules in fall 2013/spring 2014 with nine more anticipated in the next three years. These first published modules will explore themes of climate change, mineral resources and natural hazards. These free online modules each provide about two weeks of course materials and are designed to fit into the emerging instructional environment that makes greater use of online resources that can be readily deconstructed into their independent parts and reconfigured with local examples and materials to suit the needs of the specific instructor and/or learner.