Focus Group 3: Developing and Providing Responsive Curricula to Broaden Participation in the Geoscience Workforce
August 9-11, 2015
This meeting is focused on geoscience resource providers to help identify the current and desired state of interactions between the creators and users of educational material, as well as the beneficiaries of these partnerships (geoscience employers). We will focus on how resource providers interact with 2YCs and MSIs to provide timely and responsive instructional resources, materials, and tools. We will next explore the desired state of these interactions, and finally identify what resources, incentives, support, and programs are needed to improve collaboration between employers, users, and providers. The final product of this focus group will be a systems model showing how these stakeholder groups can best collaborate to support geoscience instruction at 2YCs and MSIs.
Topics to be Addressed
1. Current State
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What are resource providers currently doing to get their resources into the hands of instructors at 2YCs and MSIs?
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What strategies have been successful?
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What are the limitations of particular strategies?
2. Desired State
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What is the ideal strategy for continually creating new educational material to meet the needs of the workforce and society?
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What is the ideal strategy for maintaining and updating databases of educational resources for use by wider audiences in the long-term?
3. Closing the Gap - Models of Educational Collaborations
- What would be the best method for informing resource providers of needed curriculum?
- How quickly can material be created in response to new geoscience issues?
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How can University researchers contribute their resources such as equipment and field sites to allow 2YCs to properly teach curriculum developed by resource providers?
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Is there a method for resource providers to work together to avoid redundancy?
4. Pulling it Together: A Model for Educational Resource Support of Geoscience Instruction at MSIs/2YCs
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Who is paying for educational resource production? Who should be paying?
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What role can 2YC and MSI instructors play in the development of curriculum?