As our planet faces climate change, mass species extinction, deforestation and other issues, environmental education is becoming increasingly important. To address these issues, the PI for this project created a series of interactive tutorials (pre-quizzes) that consisted of questions and answers, provided concise explanations of some concepts and offered additional resources to the students. She developed tutorials on human population, forests, soils and agriculture, water resources, climate change, renewable energy, waste management and other topics.
The tutorials were introduced to learners at the beginning of each weekly modules in Canvas to help the students assess their preexisting knowledge of the material and focus their attention on the learning objectives of each module.
These tutorials focused on questions relevant to students’ lives and allowed the students to learn in a fun and interactive way. They included some interesting and surprising facts that hopefully inspired students to learn more about environmental issues and sustainability. They also provided up-to-date information which is especially important in the rapidly changing field of natural resource management.
The PI worked on these tutorials during the summer of 2021 and added them to the courses NREM 120 (Introduction to Renewable Resources) and HON 323 D (Exploring Environmental Issues through Documentaries) in the fall 2021. The PI shared these tutorials in Canvas Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. PDF versions of the tutorials are available to download in the Iowa State University Digital Repository.
As one student in the course shared,
"I really like that the pre-quizzes were added to each module. This helped introduce the topic in an engaging way. The questions caused myself to pay more attention and become more interested in the topic we were about to learn about. This questions also made myself ask more questions, which had me thinking more and more about each subject. This was valuable in my strive to learn!"
Links:
- Pre-quiz: Introduction - The State of Our Planet; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Soil and Agriculture; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Water Resources; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Forests; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Waste Management; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Human Population; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Climate Change; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Renewable Energy; (in Canvas Commons)
- Pre-quiz: Tutorial on Biodiversity; (in Canvas Commons)
Citation: Skrynnikova, L.R. (2022). [Title of Individual Tutorial Cited]. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Digital Repository.