Hi Mike, We finished the semester using Microsoft Teams and remote desktop access to our computers within the faculty. The experience for the student is a bit different but after a bit of practice it works pretty well. The first thing to keep in mind is that internet access is not the same for everyone. I mix synchronous and asynchronous content. I recorded my lectures and allowed students to have access to these before the laboratory period (asynchronous). For the fall, I am setting up a lightboard (https://lightboard.info/) in my home office and I will record my lectures with that. My ‘synchronous’ lab. periods are still recorded so that students with poor connections can still benefit from the questions asked by their peers. During the lab sessions, I can share my screen with the students and they get to follow the processing steps and the interpretation just as they would do in class. Students can share their screens and I can help them troubleshoot their Python scripts and answer their questions about interpretation of the data. Zoom and Microsoft Teams are quite flexible. If you would like a bit more advice on how to get started, don’t hesitate.
Key learnings : 1. The content has to be adapted so that students can grasp key concepts rapidly. A lecture should be split into five-minute segments if it is possible. 2. Your video production skills will improve rapidly and don’t sweat the small stuff. Up to now, I have instrument demonstrations for a Worden gravimeter, an ABEM Terrameter and a Geometrics Stratavisor (refraction survey) . They are narrated in French but I could do an English narration on them if it can help. I should produce a GPR demo before the end of the fall-term and record videos that demonstrate the use of our ancient magnetometers and Max-Min system. Just let me know if any of these may be useful for you and I will be happy to share them with you. 3. Looking back on this experience, the hardest thing is not content creation… it is assessing the students. Traditional exams are a no-go and so it requires an important amount of adaptation. I have experimented with Crowdmark (https://crowdmark.com/) and Gradescope (https://www.gradescope.com/). They both have strengths and weaknesses. Happy to discuss the different use cases with you if you want. I usually have between 30 and 75 students in my classes. With these solutions, students can work on their computers or on paper and submit questions by taking pictures of their solutions. One of the downside is that they can also send each other pictures of their solutions. I had multiple versions of my exam to limit cheating. Marking is actually where these shine… it cut my marking time in more than half. I expect that this time saving becomes even more significant once your classes get larger. I hope that this helps. I am interested in making the best of this… glass half-full kind of guy 😊. If people are interested, we could collaborate on the production of open-access courseware. After completing teaching material for my applied geophysics course, I aim to tackle measurement of physical properties for groundwater and mining. I have an undergraduate and a graduate class that could benefit from this material. Best regards, Christian Dupuis PS: – My undergraduate course will likely use your textbook in the fall 😊 From: Mike Dentith <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2020 9:49 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [SEGMIN] teaching applied geophysics on line Good evening everyone Along with just about every other Tertiary institution in the world, the University of Western Australia now requires all teaching to be carried out on line or as a combination of one line and face to face but in this case the option for a student to do the entire course on line must also be provided. I was seeking to initiate some a discussion about how best to teach exploration geophysics on-line. My teaching is entirely in the southern hemisphere second semester so I have avoided having to do any of this so far but I will be have to teaching units on a whole range of applied geophysics subjects in the next few months. I’m primarily thinking about how best to teach material such as interpretation of seismic data and interpretation of gravity and magnetic images etc. Teaching the other aspects of geophysics is not so different from teaching other science subjects and there is plenty of advice etc on how to do this. But not so on interpretation of geophysical imagery. I’m interested in how other people went about this? What worked and what didn’t? Talking to my geology colleagues who faced a related problem, e.g. teaching microscope/thin section petrology on-line, they emphasised the need to have as many worked examples as possible to hand since you cant have the same one-to-one discussion of a students progress such as you can in a laboratory and being able to refer to a suite of examples to some extent mitigates this . That seems to me to a potentially valid approach but its incredibly time consuming to create good materials of this kind. Of course there are lots of on-line resources on say seismic interpretation – but which did people find to be most useful etc – and access to many of these resources is limited to single–user and to members of professional societies etc. Any thoughts and advice from those who have already had to deal with these issues would be much appreciated. Regards Mike Dentith
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