Learning Materials
Scran Learning Materials
Case Study
1. Author details
| Name: | Dr Gordon Curry |
| Job title: | Reader |
| Institution: | Division of Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow |
About the author:
Have been teaching Earth Sciences for 20 years, at all levels from first year to honours students. Involved in teaching a wide range of topics, including environmental earth science, earth history, major earth processes, palaeontology, human health and environment, geophysics. Virtually all my teaching is now based on Powerpoint presentations, and I have been involved with several teaching projects to develop WWW resources for teaching, including the preparation of an virtual fieldtrip (although on a smaller scale to the Scran one). I am the WWW master for our departmental www site, so have considerable experience of html.
2. The materials
A WWW geological fieldtrip to the island of Arran. Created as a multi-purpose resource, which will have direct applications to complement first or second year undergraduate Earth Science teaching (which includes an actual week long field trip to Arran) and can also act to introduce school and amateur groups who are interested in geology and outdoor fieldwork, and are willing to make the effort to do some extra work to learn new names and processes.
Why did you want to create these materials?
Earth Sciences is a field subject which also requires information from laboratory investigations (e.g. thin sections of rocks) and it is impossible to integrate these two aspects in any other way. Also images are very important to Earth Sciences, and this is the only way to bring such a wide range of relevant images together.
How will your materials benefit learners?
By helping them prepare for fieldwork before going out into the field for the first, by allowing them to compensate for important aspects missed in the field due to ill-health, bad weather, and by allowing disabled people to partake in a way that would otherwise be impossible.
How will they improve on previous methods of teaching this topic?
Images of rocks and locations will help them remember key facts, the site will always be available, and it will help them learn and revise by pointing them to additional resources.
3. Creating the materials
What tools did you use?
Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Internet Explorer and Netscape (the last two were used to test site).
What additional support did you need in creating the materials?
Graham MacLeod, a student at Glasgow, did a lot of the research and wrote a lot of the text – I did all the work with images and prepared all the www pages, and edited the final versions using Dreamweaver. The design of the site was prepared by a designer in the Media Services department of the University – the design was completed before any pages were created.
What are the main skills required in creating materials like this?
Knowledge of html, and familiarity with relevant computer programs above.
Describe any difficulties you experienced and how you went about addressing them.
Keeping track of the image details from the Scran site was the biggest problem – ended up with huge pile of papers with jotted notes. Ended up with a colour coding system to try to keep track of what was going on, but never really got this sorted properly.
What would you do differently next time?
Would probably try to create a better system of keeping track of the images, by getting them first, and writing down what they contained and showed. The problem is that the need for illustrative material developed in step with the growth of the www site, so I am not sure that this can ever be organised to my satisfaction, while there are limitation on the search functions in the Scran database.
What hints and tips would you offer to a colleague planning to create a similar resource?
Make sure everything is planned in advance, especially layout of the site, images, and the overall design.
