A virtual geosciences professor

Abstract Many universities are considering how best to meet the challenges of changing student characteristics (older students, more females, and increasing numbers of under-represented students) and changing fiscal climate (insufficient funding to sustain existing initiatives and develop new ones). Many are exploring the potential of Internet-based resources as an element in both synchronous courses (everyone in the same place at the same time) and asynchronous courses (where members of the class could be in many different places at different times). Simply using the Internet to broadcast course content (where information flow is primarily from the instructor to the class) fails to take advantage of its distributed nature. Perhaps the greatest contribution of “new technologies” will be a rethinking of what is required for learning to occur. The Internet itself is the best place for finding out how these resources are being incorporated into formal courses. Approximately half of the Geosciences Departments in the United States and Canada have Internet home pages. More than 200 geosciences courses, produced by more than 70 of these academic departments have Internet-based home pages. An increasing number of field trips, course exercises, tours, reference materials, poster sessions, and student projects are appearing which can be incorporated into new courses.