Serving the Specific Content Needs in the Broad Audience

Designing an introductory course is one of the most difficult challenges in teaching. Ironically, introductory courses are usually the courses given to new faculty in departments. A typical introductory Earth system course may be serving the following audiences:

• geology majors, who are framing their future study of geosciences within the broader context of the Earth system
• education majors, who will likely take only one Earth science course to prepare them for teaching all the topics in K-8 Earth science
• non-majors, who are seeking breadth in their science education and will be garnering most, if not all of the knowledge base they will be using to evaluate past and present global change concerns