Educational Initiatives
Well-funded and supported by dedicated specialists, research and development in STEM education is a priority in our department.
Ongoing
This project aims to support Indigenous Strategic Plan (ISP) efforts across UBC Science (and beyond) by developing an assessment toolkit that can be used by instructors or units to determine whether students are reporting a greater understanding of how Indigenous topics intersect with their field of study in Science.
Ongoing
This project aims to engage and partner with Indigenous undergraduate and graduate students in UBC Science to learn more about their experiences, needs, and desires with respect to curriculum, pedagogy, research, educational programming, and advising.
Ongoing
The EaSEIL project aims to create space for collaborative reflection among students, instructors, staff, and community members to reimagine, develop, and transform field-based experiential learning across multiple programs, departments and Faculties at UBC.
Ongoing
We will develop, implement and evaluate a revised ENSC curriculum that will realign existing courses with updated Specialization Objectives (SO) and Learning Goals (LG), revise current course pedagogies to accommodate larger class sizes, and build new courses to embed and progressively develop: data analysis, computational, and problem-solving skills; intersections of climate change with other environmental and equity concerns; opportunities to work across different knowledge systems; connections to complementary fields of study; exposure to diverse professionals in the environmental sector and opportunities to develop a professional identity.
Ongoing
The SCI-LEnS project aims to develop a new graduate course that will build an informal learning space paradigm at UBC. In collaboration with museum professionals, students will explore best practices and pedagogical approaches for creating effective public-facing content in science museums, with the key project goal of shifting the lens through which scientists engage with public audiences.
Completed
We aim to develop an interactive Climate Dashboard in EOSC 340 (Global Climate Change) to empower students in climate-related courses to explore climate model simulation data, enabling them to analyze differences between models for specific regions and models, presenting results via maps or scatterplots.
Completed
In 2017, UBC’s departments of EOAS and Geography embarked on an ambitious partnership with the University of Central Asia (UCA) to design, develop and transfer a 22-course curriculum making up UCA’s new undergraduate B.Sc. program in Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) focusing on issues of importance to mountain societies.
Completed
In 2007, EOAS became the first department in UBC’s Faculty of science to be approved for the 7 year Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI). The aim was to increase the effectiveness of post-secondary science education for all undergraduate students taking courses offered by our Department.
Completed
This three-year project will improve students’ abilities to apply scientific knowledge, data and reasoning to personal and societal decisions; a primary educational goal for a scientifically literate society. In EOSC114, the Catastrophic Earth, taught annually to over 2000 face to face (f2f) and distance education (DE) students, we will re-configure existing content within a natural hazards framework and build corresponding learning activities and assessments for both the f2f and DE settings.
Completed
This project aimed to enhance the flexibility, quality and efficiency of learning and delivery for related distance education (DE) and face-to-face (f2f) courses. The approach was to apply current DE best practices to f2f courses, adapt f2f best practices for use online, and introduce new resources and pedagogies that work in both settings.
Completed
Interactive learning activities, materials and corresponding infrastructure will be developed to engage students in learning experiences related to multi-disciplinary geoscience problems and phenomena. Students will be able to create, review, explore and analyze virtual geo-referenced field sites, field specimens or materials and allied information.
Completed
The Environmental Science (ENSC) core courses (ENVR 200, 300, 400) culminate in a two-term community-based team project in which students collaborate, design, and undertake an authentic research project. We propose a new video-prompted activity for ENVR 200 to present locally relevant and persistent case studies in environmental science (climate change and food production) including candid community perspectives presented in context to highlight the complexity of the issue.
Completed
Opensource Computing for Earth Science Education is a three-year, large TLEF-funded project that will incorporate open source computational tools in EOAS courses and transform teaching practices to support hands-on interdisciplinary learning in data-driven scientific exploration.
Completed
In 2014, UBC’s Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and Physics and Astronomy departments received generous funding from the Harris family to pilot paired teaching as a follow-up to the CWSEI (see above). During the project, 27 instructors across these two departments taught 18 courses to over 2,500 students in the pilot program, and research was disseminated through several scholarly publications.
Completed
By developing introductory online lessons for GIS in parallel with new course-specific GIS-based lab exercises, this project will ensure that all students in EOAS are given a level foundation in GIS skills in the context of applied earth science.
Completed
The Quantitative Earth Sciences Transformation initiative seeks to transform and modernize quantitative Earth sciences education at UBC.
Completed
In ATSC 113 Applied Meteorology (Weather for Sailing, Flying, and Snow Sports), we will use online narratives to create weekly scenarios of deteriorating weather conditions. Each student plays a different role (skipper, passenger, regulator, weather briefer) in their group and is given different information (sailboat characteristics, distractors, warning issuance, atmospheric behaviour). Group members succeed by working together to determine the right questions to ask. This flipped (inquiry-based learning) motivates their access of online resources outside of class.
Completed
This project aims to improve the coverage of climate change and address the ongoing climate emergency by creating universal course content applicable to all four courses (EOSC 110, EOSC 112, EOSC 114, EOSC 116).