Welcome to the Geology of the Pacific Northwest!

This is a completely online class, including the laboratory part of the class.

You will work online, but you will not work alone. Effective learning is highly interactive. There are several ways that you will interact in this class. You will read and respond to what I say as your instructor and learning facilitator. You will read and respond to what the other students in the class say, and they will be your colleagues and companions in a shared learning adventure. You will post your own preliminary thoughts online. You will subsequently post your refined research results, sharpened by seeing and reflecting on what others said about your ideas.

The goal of Week 0 is for you to understand what it takes for successful learning in this Geology of the Pacific Northwest online class. By continuing with the class after Week 0, you will be making a commitment to learning in interactively in this online class.

The topics of this week 0 lecture are:

1. The syllabus and the online textbook for this class
2. The interactive nature of this class
   1. Weekly online discussions
   2. Grading feedback
   3. Communicating outside the weekly lesson folder
3. Your Weekly Labs
4. Your Weekly Quizzes
5. Your Weekly Summaries
6. Completing Week 0

1. The syllabus and online textbook

The syllabus tells you how your credits will be earned in this class. It describes the required assignments, summarizes how your work will be assessed, and explains the policy on late work. (In a nutshell, late work deserves either little or no credit, and excuses are irrelevant.)

The online text for this class obviates the need for a paper textbook. (But there are one or more paperback books to consider adding to your reading; see notes on supplemental reading.)

2. Learning Interactively in the Online Class

Learning is not usually very deep, nor does it last very long, if one simply reads, takes a quiz, and moves on. Much more action, interaction, cogitation, and application is needed for a satisfactory level of learning to be obtained. An important part of higher-level learning is interactive learning. In the online classroom there are several ways that interactive learning is enabled, faciliated, and encouraged.

The most obvious form of interactive learning is the weekly online discussion. However, in the past, I have noticed that many students do not treat it interactively, demonstrated by either (a) not taking part at all, (b) not posting any messages in it until the last day or two of the week, or (c) having obviously not read the discussion up until the time they post, as evidenced by repeating mistakes that have already been pointed out and corrected in the discussion up to that point. Those behaviors are signs of not interacting with and learning from other postings and participants in the discussion, not joining the rest of the class on a track upward on the learning curve. Much better are the signs of joining the interactive learning adventure by posting during the first half of the week, posting more than twice, and posting on more than one day, as well as responding to any questions or corrections raised about things that you said in the discussion. The nice thing about the weekly discussion is that it is a learning track, not a quiz. You can get it all wrong to begin with, and that can be a good thing as you see how to post a corrected, improved idea by the end, earning your full participation points.

The essay answers that you write in the lab assignments can, in some cases, be iteratively interactive: first I give you the question (having provided some resources in the lecture and linked materials); you write your answer and submit it as part of your online lab answer form submission by the end of the week; then I write some feedback on your answer; and in some cases I may give you a chance to improve your answer if a sound geological understanding was not demonstrated the first time around. Alternatively, you can email me, or post a question in the weekly discussion, asking for some guidance on some questions you have not answered completely, or asking for clarification on instructions, before you complete and submit your answer. All these examples are interactive modes of learning.

Another, different form of interactive learning is to be sure to cite your sources of information in any essay, including your main weekly discussion postings and lab essay question answers. This shows that you are interacting intelligently with the texts of scholars, scientists, and researchers who have delved into the topic and made published progress before you entered the subject as a learner and scholar yourself.

1. Weekly online discussions: In each weekly online discussion you will read through the threads of the discussions that have been written up until the time you open it and take a look. You will write your main ideas regarding the discussion question. You will respond to questions and points that your correspondents, including me, write in response to the ideas that you post. You will post responses to other students' postings in the discussion thread. This will require you to enter and post in the discussion during the first three days of the week, then again during the next two days (of a regular seven-day week), and again during the last two days. Add it up: at least three postings are required to approach the higher levels of demonstrated learning progress and contributions to the weekly discussion. Usually, it will take more than three posts, spread out over more than a coupple of days of the week, in which your sequence of messages shows progress in your knowledge and your ability to communicate it to others, to achieve the maximum credit possible.
   
   
2. Grading feedback: You will open your graded online assignments and read the feedback you get from me on selected essay questions. Sometimes you will see that I am giving you an opportunity, if you respond to the feedback and follow the instructions, to improve your performance and raise your results on the assignment.
   
   
3. Communicating outside the weekly lesson folder: If you have a personal matter, such as a question on a particular essay answer grade on one of your assignments, you can email me in the Communications area of the online classroom. I will automatically be forwarded a copy to my own college email inbox, to help make sure I get your email in a timely fashion and can respond to it quickly.

3. Weekly Labs

The labs include exploring virtual field trip sites, assessed on the basis of essay and sometimes multiple-choice or short-answer questions. Parts of several labs have you work with actual rocks (assessed for correct answers) and with actual geological maps (assessed by assigned drawings that are marked and labeled by you to develop and reveal your level of insight into the mapped geology). Some lab questions are more theoretical and your essay answers in some cases may require some outside reading on the Web.

Weekly Pre-Lab

Each week, before you get to the lab, you must take the pre-lab.

Your answers to the pre-lab are entered in the pre-lab answer form. You earn all the points by making the attempt, by answering all the questions—regardless of whether your answers are correct.  

Use the results from your pre-lab to guide how you study and prepare to complete the lab later in the week. Look for the feedback on your pre-lab results, and ask me for more feedback or clarification if need be. 

Like on each lab, on each pre-lab you must answer all questions, including all essay questions. It impacts the scores of pre-lab and lab answer forms to leave questions unanswered, particularly essay questions. (Only a few of the questions on pre-lab and lab answer forms are in essay format.)

The essay questions are of utmost importance. On essay question answers, you must not copy, and must cite your sources of information.

(Citations of information sources in lab essay answers are informal. A URL or "the Week 1 Lecture" are examples of good enough citations).

Do not write "I don't know" if you don't know the answer to an essay question. Make an educated or reasonable guess.

In a normal week, the pre-lab is due during the first four days of the week. The lab itself won't be available until the last three days of the week.

4. Weekly Quizzes

The quiz each week is multiple-choice and is based mainly on the lecture and the course Web pages hyperlinked to the lecture, though of course you may have to follow a logical line of thinking beyond the lecture in some cases to reach a conclusive answer.

Weekly Pre-Quiz

Each week, before you get to the quiz, you must take the pre-quiz. If you try answering each question in the pre-quiz to the best of your knowledge, even if you have to guess on some of them, that's OK, it's a pre-quiz; by simply making the effort and taking it, you will earn all the pre-quiz points.

Please note that, to earn credit, the pre-quiz needs to be answered in a pattern that indicates you read each question and considered all the answer choices before making your answer selection.

In a normal week, the pre-quiz is due during the first four days of the week. The quiz itself won't be available until the last three days of the week.

Besides providing a baseline to see how many more questions you can answer correctly by the end of the week compared to earlier in the week, your pre-quiz results will show you which questions you need to study and solve in the meantime, because the same questions will be on the quiz. 

5. Weekly Summaries

Your weekly summary is a chance for you to describe the highlights of what you learned during the week now ending in Pacific Northwest Geology, including use of some of the terms and brief explanations of some of the concepts. Less than the maximum amount of points is awarded to summaries that are too short (only one or two sentences is too short) and that do not specifically discuss and apply any of the terms and ideas learned during the week. A summary cannot succed as just a list of names of things you learned about. Those things most be defined or explained, at least to some extent. Though not required, credit in weekly summaries also goes to describing how the geological ideas you have learned about can be applied to places you have seen and visited yourself.

6. Completing Your Week 0

To complete your Week 0 learning progress, you need to:

Introduce yourself in the Mini-Bio's folder.

Take part in the Week 0 Discussion. (Not quite so much messaging is expected here as will be in future weekly discussions.)

Take the Week 0 Pre-Quiz.

Take the Week 0 Quiz.

At the end of Week 0, write and post your Week 0 Summary.

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