Using NASA climate data to improve effectiveness of undergraduate-level climate change education
Abstract
Global climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing society today, and yet the science of global climate change and the potential effects are poorly understood by the general population. Through a NASA Innovations in Climate Education grant, UC Riverside is addressing this disconnect by fully redesigning the undergraduate level Earth Sciences courses, which serve over 3,000 students every year. The majority of these students are not Earth Sciences majors and so these changes in the climate change education curriculum reach a very broad range of students. This new curriculum centers around a new website that hosts online activities that allows students to utilized and manipulate NASA climate data sets in order to directly observe changes in the global climate system. All lower division Earth Sciences courses will include online activities and a unit on global climate change. In addition to this general improvement in climate change education, we have restructured our lower division Climate Change course (GEO 11) to focus on these online activities in order to give students first-hand experience with both global and local climate data. Because these activities are hosted online, they can be seemlessly integrated with other online resources, accessed from school or home and be viewed on a variety of devices, thus vastly increasing student accessibility. In the future, these activities will be available to other institutions. UC Riverside is an ideal institution at which to launch a broad-reaching climate change education program like this. As one of the most socioeconomically and ethnically diverse universities and one of only two federally-designated Hispanic Serving Research Institutions, UC Riverside primarily educates undergraduate students from the portions of society that will be most heavily impacted by the effects of climate change. GEO 11 and the other lower division courses produce climate-literate students of different majors and backgrounds, who can continue on to serve as climate science advocates in society.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFMED33A0745D
- Keywords:
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- 0810 EDUCATION / Post-secondary education;
- 0820 EDUCATION / Curriculum and laboratory design;
- 0855 EDUCATION / Diversity;
- 1699 GLOBAL CHANGE / General or miscellaneous