Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary (99). The online environment has become a major delivery mode for general education science courses, presenting a variety of unique problems and obstacles to teaching and learning. Using the Chesapeake Bay as a unifying theme, this project is addressing these challenges by creating and implementing the Virtual Chesapeake Bay Watershed (VCBW), an interactive, inquiry-based, integrated, and inter-disciplinary online laboratory for students and faculty. The VCBW is an innovative online version of the large multidisciplinary teaching labs and science resource centers found at most universities, and will consist of a comprehensive set of interactive online instructional materials. Materials will be aligned with state and national scientific literacy standards and with online pedagogical standards. The project includes a faculty training and support program that provides guidelines for the effective use of the VCBW in teaching, as well as best practices in online science education. The VCBW will be developed by the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in partnership with the Center for Watershed Protection. It will be used in UMUC classes, shared freely with UMUC's fourteen community college alliance partners, and made available to all science educators through licensing agreements. A description of the VCBW will be linked to the NSDL and DLESE web sites. The project evaluation plan will assess the impact of this approach on student learning and provide new insights regarding the pedagogical strategies that are distinctive to success in the online environment.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in the implementation of a comprehensive approach to online general education in science that integrates the design and creation of instructional materials, assessment of student learning outcomes, and faculty training and support. The broader impact of the project lies in its potential: 1) to reach a very large number of students, including many from groups that are underrepresented in the sciences, 2) to serve as a pedagogical model for online science education, and 3) to create a network of scholars focused on new applications of technology to science education.
