GEOGRAPHY, RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT OF LATIN AMERICA: A LOWER DIVISION COURSE ON YOUTUBE, DESIGNED TO INTEREST HISPANIC STUDENTS AND OTHERS TO WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR SOUTHERN NEIGHBORS

We need to do a better job teaching undergraduates about the remarkable and increasingly important region south of the USA known as Latin America. For this purpose, we updated a course we developed in the 1990s and recorded the lectures, which are posted for free and easy watching on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzpHDPjNs-iHyuopFCKtdv2TsiP6c5Ozb. There is no suitable textbook, so course content is based on 23 lectures, each ~1 hr long. The course begins with a lecture on the geography of the region and its nations as well as important physical features of Latin America like the Amazon and the Andes. The next four lectures explore the cultural and physical geography of Latin America, introduces Plate Tectonic concepts, and outlines the geologic evolution of the region. After this, four more lectures explore how and when people came to the region, ultimately leading to the great Inca and Aztec civilizations, how metals were used by these cultures, the Spanish conquest of Aztecs and Incas, and how silver mining dominated the colonial economies of Mexico and Peru. The next 5 lectures focus on other resources of Latin America: nitrate and copper mining in Chile, geothermal energy in Central America, oil and gas basics, oil and gas in Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil, and lithium mining in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. These are followed by two lectures on natural hazards of earthquakes and volcanoes. The last 7 lectures mostly deal with the Latin American environment: El Nino, glaciers and climate change, the Amazon River, rain forests, coral reefs, and US-Mexico water issues emphasizing the Rio Grande, with a final lecture on the Antilles of the Caribbean. We are teaching this class in F22. Anyone can watch these lectures whenever they want but students enrolled in the course must take in-person exams at set dates and times We encourage students enrolled in the class to sign up for an optional 1-hour discussion section. Students enrolled in the class at UTD must pass a geography test after the first midterm along with three midterms and a final exam.