PHYSICAL GEOLOGY and OUR EARTH -- A comparasion of two online college courses that I took

Guestbook

COURSE 1: Our Earth: Its Climate, Process and History provided by the University of Manchester on Coursera

This course aimd to help students develop a greater appreciation for how the air, water, land, and life formed and have interacted over the last 4.5 billion years, covering topics such as hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and biosphere.

COURSE 2: Physical Geology provided by Nanjing University on MOOC

This is a geology course introducing the feature and dynamics of the earth. The topics it covered including the evolution of the Earth, tectonic movements (earthquakes, folds, faults), internal forces (magmatism, metamorphism), and external forces (weathering, wind, rivers, lakes) and rocks and minerals.

My Certificate

Lecture Structure

Our Earth:

  • WEEK1: Building Blocks of Earth’s Climate System
  • WEEK2: Formation, evolution, and process of the solid Earth
  • WEEK3: Water in Earth’s Climate System: Oceans, Atmosphere, and Cryosphere
  • WEEK4: Life, and its Effect on Earth’s Climate System
  • WEEK5: Build Your Own Earth and Conclusion

Physical Geology:

Course Format

Our Earth: The course is mainly taught by Prof. David M. Schultz, Professor of Synoptic Meteorology. In the vedio, he often teaches alone with his slide, while occasionally he also invites other relevant faculty members (such as geochemistry professors, or laboratory researchers) to introduce more specific content through their conversation.

Physical Geology: This course is a video of Professor Shu Liangshu’s class giving to the students at NTU.

Assessment

Our Earth:

  • Multiple Choices (Single Answer & Multiple Answer)
  • A self-designed model: This is not compulsory, but students can build models on their own under the instruction of videos.

Physical Geology:

  • Multiple Choices (Single Answer)
  • True-or-false Questions: Judgment on some important key points which are easy to confuse students
  • Discussions: Often related to key points taught in course, occasionally are open questions.

Other Resources

Our Earth: Provide an activity called BYOE (build your own earth), which is a vision that they have to engage students in understanding the controls on Earth’s climate. Their vision is for us students to selecting the features we want: distance from the Sun, tilt of the axis, location of continents, oceans and mountains, rotation rate, atmospheric composition, etc. We would enter these characteristics on a web page, push the “Go” button, and a climate model would run in the background and produce the climate on that world for us. However, such a vision is not currently possible with the speed of today’s computers. Hence instead, they preselected about 50 Earths, did the computer simulations already, and prepared plots of the simulation results for students to examine.

http://www.buildyourownearth.com/

Physical Geology: The whole set of courses mainly revolves around Professor Shu Liangshu’s “Physical Geology”, which is also the most commonly used compulsory textbook for all geological major students in China. At the same time, Professor Shu also provided his courseware, summary of knowledge points, and some exercises for students’ self-study.

My Feedback

In “Our Earth”, Professor David M. Schultz introduce plenty of basic knowledge of earth science to students in a simple and clear way. This was my first try of university courses as well as my first time studing earth sciences in English, and undoubtly the course successfully deepens my interest in this subject. The teaching environment of this course is lovely and friendly. The professor gives a variety of vivid examples to help us understand the abstruse knowledge. He also tries to create a lively teaching and studying atmosphere through his conversation with other professors or showing us around the school laboratory in the video, etc. After taking this course, I re-understood how the Earth works and its characteristics in a systematic way. Meanwhile, I also realized that the university curriculum will provide children with more space for independent inquiry than the high school ones, as the teacher will not provide a large number of questions for exam or practice. In addition, I was fascinated by the final model designing. Even though it’s not compulsory, I still find this model very meaningful as it allows me to understand in a more intuitive way how different propertys affect a planet’s climate patterns.

In contrast, the “Physical Geology” course is more traditional. Professor Shu introduced us a great amount of basic principles of earth sciences (especially geology), which is relatively in-depth and professional. What attracted me most was that, after introducing almost every key point, Mr. Shu would show a large number of pictures related - which were all taken by himself during his field trip of travelling. Through this, I realized that the knowledge we learned in textbooks can be applied to explain a variety of phenomena in real life, and perhaps this is also one important meaning of studying geology and geography. I also look forward to the day when I will be able to apply principles and theories to my daily life, and explain the world with the theories I have learned.