Initial Publication Date: December 8, 2016

Tim Bralower and Brent Yarnal: Using Coastal Processes, Hazards and Society at Pennsylvania State University — Main Campus

About this course

students

One 75-minute lab each week

Large public 4-year university

Course syllabus (Acrobat (PDF) 1000kB Oct28 15)

Show the description of Coastal Processes, Hazards and Society

This course provides a global perspective of coastal landscapes, the processes responsible for their formation, diversity, and change through time, as well as societal responses to changes in the coastal zones of the planet. Active learning elements include analyzing real data sets and applying critical thinking and problem-solving skills to real-world coastal issues that affect human populations. Students must complete a capstone project in which they consider a real-world coastal issue from a list of approved cities.

Show more about the course goals and content

Course goals and content

The purpose of this course is to enable students to analyze and understand the complex physical and social processes that form coastal zones, expose landscapes, people, and property to coastal hazards, and make them vulnerable to those hazards. Therefore, by the end of this course, students will demonstrate that they can:

Demonstrate geospatial skills and concepts
Explain the evolution of coastal morphology
Link physical and social impacts of coastal hazards
Evaluate engineering options to mitigate coastal risks
Assess vulnerability to coastal hazards
Create a plan for responding to coastal hazards

The course is one of several new introductory courses that comprise new certificate and minors in Earth sustainability that are offered across the Penn State system.

A Success Story in Building Student Engagement

The class is in hybrid format with the lecture online at the PSU version of the course. Our weekly 75-minute class period was devoted to lab activities as well as brief discussions. Each of the twelve modules opened on Monday, and the lab met on Thursday. Students were urged to read the lecture materials before coming to class to maximize their learning. Students worked on the lab materials in pairs. Many of the students in the class were geography majors with considerable interest in the course materials and skills to manage the highly interdisciplinary nature of the course.

My Experience Teaching with InTeGrate Materials

This is one of a growing number of blended courses offered on campus as a result of the InTeGrate program. Students are not that familiar with the blended learning model, but the activities seemed to enrich their learning in the course. There is ongoing task force that is promoting interdisciplinarity in general education courses so the timing is excellent.

How We Taught this Course

The course is classified as a natural science lab course, and all students are required to take at least one of these, so there is considerable demand. The course is an elective in a new certificate program and proposed minor in Earth sustainability, and given the significance of the topic, we hope that interest will remain strong.

All of the material is described in the PSU course website: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/. The advantage of having the lecture materials online is that the students come to class having read them and are ready to apply their knowledge. The professor can devote the lab time to interacting with the students, and learning where they are having difficulty, as well as making the course more relevant to each individual. The students work in teams, and initially we paired seniors with freshmen and juniors with sophomores. We changed the pairings mid-semester and in some cases paired senior and junior students together at this point.

Assessments

As the semester proceeded, students appeared to be overworked by the early modules, which we thought were fairly light. Thus we scaled back lab assignments in Modules 4 and 5 which were clearly heavier. It was also clear that students were not beginning work on the capstone during Module 3, and that this component of the class needed to be explained in more detail. This has led to substantial revisions of the materials, and a much more proactive approach in presenting it in subsequent offerings.

Outcomes

The course is one quarter geology, one quarter hazards, one quarter engineering, and one quarter policy. The interdisciplinarity of the course grows during the semester, and students are pushed to make connections between the different components. From our view, the balance of science, engineering and policy kept the course engaging for the whole semester. The students learned a lot, and their lab assignments and midterms showed a great deal of appreciation of the topics that were introduced.

One of the main issues we found with the course the first and second times it was offered is that it is a lot of work for the students compared to other general education classes. The combination of quiz, blog, lab assignments, midterms and capstone is a lot. The second time we offered the class, we had three students drop because they could not keep up. So we have trimmed back on the labs so the students can complete them in the lab periods. For example, many modules have more than one formative assessment and a summative assessment, so we trimmed the formative labs that we had the students complete.

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