Developing Online Oceanography at UCSB

Oceanography at UCSB is an introductory general education science course taken by up to 200 students per quarter. The emphasis is on learning science process by engaging in authentic science activities that use real earth data. Recently, to increase student motivation, the course has been modified to include an Earth Summit framework. The online support being developed for this course is the first step in the creation of a completely online oceanography class. Foundation software was first tested in the class during Spring 2001. Online activities that are supported are writing and instructor feedback, online threaded discussion with live chat and graphics, automatically graded homeworks and games, auto graded quizzes with questions randomly selected from a database, and thought problems graded by the instructor(s). Future plans include integration with commercial course management software. To allow choice of assignments, all course activities totaled110%. Since grades were based on A=90-100, B=80-90, C= 70-80, etc, it was possible to get a better than A grade. Students see the effect (on their grade) of each assignment by calculating their current course grade. Course activities included (most of which are automatically graded): weekly lab homeworks, weekly mini-quizzes (10 multiple choice questions selected at random from a topic database), weekly thought questions (graded by the TA), 3 written assignments, and "Question of the Day" from lecture (credit given for handing it in), The online writing software allowed students to enter their writing, edit and link to graphic images, print the paper, and electronically hand it in. This has the enormous advantage of allowing the instructor and TA's convenient access to all student papers. At the end of the course, students were asked how effective each of the course activities were in learning the course material. On a five point scale, ranging from highest contribution to lowest, the percentage of students giving ratings of 4 or 5 (highest) were: lectures: 27%, labs: 70%, earth summit activities: 57%, weekly thought questions: 36%, Questions of the day: 34%, weekly quizzes: 51%, weekly homeworks: 48%, writing assignments: 68%. Course difficulty responses were symmetrically peaked at a rating of 3, indicating that the course was taught at the right level. 64% of the students responded with 4 or 5 level to "I worked very hard in this class." Join the DLESE "Oceanography" interest group (www.dlese.org) to discuss and help develop oceanography course materials. >http://oceanography.geol.ucsb.edu/Support/CourseWare/Index.html</ a>