Initial Publication Date: July 28, 2019

Finding Resources for Teaching on the SERC Website

Compiled by Carol Ormand, SERC, and Ben Laabs, North Dakota State University, for the 2019 workshop for Early Career Faculty in the Geosciences

Open Educational Resources (OERs) for college-level geoscience classes are becoming increasingly abundant and have numerous advantages for students and faculty. OERs include open textbooks, open online classes, instructional videos, and a variety of teaching and learning activities. The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) website hosts a vast array of OERs for geoscience teaching and more. This session discusses the value of OERs in terms of pedagogy, customization, and ease of integration, and provides time to explore how OERs may be used in your own class(es). The page below provides a brief tour of OERs available through SERC.

Of special interest for early career faculty

The early career geoscience faculty website has a set of pages about efficient, effective teaching: how to teach well, without it taking over your life
Designing Effective and Innovative Courses

On specific topics

The On the Cutting Edge project, of which this workshop is a part, has modules on a wide range of courses and topics

On teaching methods

Expanding Your Teaching Toolkit is a page of resources to make your courses more interactive. If you're not sure where to begin, in terms of incorporating active learning pedagogies into your teaching, start here.
Pedagogy in Action aims to help faculty put into practice in the classroom what we've learned from research on learning. It includes detailed descriptions of the what, why and how of various teaching methods and has a collection of examples of teaching activities using each method. If you're ready to dive in, these pages are for you.
On the Cutting Edge has run a number of webinars on effective teaching methods.

On teaching a concept or skill across multiple courses

The InTeGrate project is all about teaching about sustainability across the curriculum, and includes information on how to teach sustainability as well as modules and courses that you can adopt or adapt for your classroom.
The Spatial Thinking Workbook is a collection of teaching activities designed to strengthen geoscience students' penetrative thinking skills: the ability to visualize spatial relations inside an object.
The Math You Need, When You Need It is a set of math tutorials for students in introductory geoscience courses.