About Our Digital Libary Collection

What is Starting Point?

The Starting Point site supports faculty and graduate students teaching entry-level undergraduate geoscience courses and laboratories of all types (including courses that address the whole Earth system, any of its subsystems, or their relationships to humans). The site provides information on instructional methods and issues in teaching customized for geoscience faculty, examples of their use in entry level geoscience courses, and opportunities for sharing, feedback, and discussion. The site is organized into modules that address specific instructional methods and provide associated examples. These modules can be accessed by browsing by instructional method or by searching the example collection by geoscience topic. The purpose of the site is to enable faculty to make well-informed choices among teaching methods and materials when designing and delivering their entry-level courses.

What is the scope of the Starting Point collection?

The collection contains records describing all modules and examples in the Starting Point site, as well as records describing the web resources referred to in these modules.

What sort of resources will the Starting Point feature?

The Starting Point collection will include resources that span the needs of faculty and graduate students designing, developing, and delivering entry-level undergraduate courses in geoscience. It will consist primarily of

• instructional materials and activities
• annotations and materials supporting the use of instructional materials and activities
• information on instructional methods and issues in teaching customized for geoscientists
• primary sources, review articles, summaries and bibliographies pertaining to pedagogy, instructional methods, assessment, issues in teaching, course development and management, and learning science

How is the quality of the Starting Point collection ensured?

The individual modules within Starting Point are created by editors selected for their expertise with the instructional method or issue and are tested and refined through review by editors, PIs, and potential users (faculty and graduate students in a variety of institutional settings). This process ensures that both the chapters themselves and their supporting resources, as entered into the Starting Point Collection, are of the highest quality. The collection records are created by Starting Point staff trained in DLESE cataloging in conformance with DLESE metadata standards and are reviewed for accuracy by a second trained cataloger before entry in into the collection.

Terms of Use

Copyright for information created as part of this project is held by Carleton College unless otherwise noted. We encourage the reuse and disemination of the material on this site for educational, noncommercial purposes as long as attribuition is retained. To this end the material on this site is offered under a Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 .

Authors of original works submitted to SERC retain their copyright. But in volunteering the works they agree to offer it under this license, allowing for reuse and redistribuition with attribuition. Authors are responsible for obtaining copywrite permission for all materials that they distribute within their work.

Persistence Plan

The Starting Point collections will be maintained by the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College for the duration the current supporting grant and into the future as long as the SERC website is in operation. If the SERC website ceases to operate, we will seek partners to ensure persitence of the collection.