PARENT SESSION
Thursday, August 10, 1:30-5:00 pm
COS 95 - Ecological education I: undergraduate teaching
L-2, Lobby Level, Cook Convention Center
Presiders: J Berkson
A new approach to summer undergraduate learning: combining case-studies, road trips, video interviews, and website development.
Berkson, Jim*,1, Murphy, Brian2, 1 National Marine Fisheries Service RTR Unit at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA2 Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences, Blacksburg, VA
ABSTRACT- NOAA Fisheries and Virginia Tech have created a unique program to help top undergraduate students learn about the complexity of marine resources ecology, population dynamics, and management. The program is case-study based, focusing on current, important marine resource issues such as loggerhead sea turtle management. Two of the four course weeks are spent traveling around the southeastern US visiting universities, marine institutes, and federal and state resource agencies; and meeting with key ecologists, marine scientists, managers, policy makers, and stakeholders involved in these issues. The students are responsible for learning the background of the issues, developing questions to ask each individaul they meet, conducting videotaped interviews, and then creating a multimedia website that explores the interplay of biological, ecological, and social issues that make up the case. The resulting case-study websites provide an excellent learning tool for a wide variety of college ecology, natural resource management, and conservation biology classrooms. In this unique program, the students are solely responsible for 1) learning about the complexity of marine resource issues through first-hand experience; and 2) effectively creating a website to share this knowledge to other students.
Key words: undergraduate education, case-study based undergraduate education, case-study based undergraduate education