505 A New Open Educational Resource for Intro-Level Atmospheric Science

Tuesday, 8 January 2019
Hall 4 (Phoenix Convention Center - West and North Buildings)
Alison D. Nugent, Univ. of Hawaii at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI; and C. Karamperidou and J. D. S. Griswold

A new Open Education Resource (OER) was created with funding from the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. OERs are materials for teaching and learning that can be used freely at no cost by anyone; our materials are designated under a creative commons copyright license. A stand-alone textbook inspired by the “Practical Meteorology” textbook by Roland Stull was created to add additional descriptive material and to aid in student learning. Traditionally the Atmospheric Science department's introductory class for majors used Ahren’s “Essentials of Meteorology” textbook and was supplemented by equations and other quantitative material in lecture. We have now transitioned to use Stull’s textbook which is quantitative, but we found it didn't have enough descriptive and qualitative content as compared to other introductory level textbooks. For this reason, we've created an OER that is simple enough for introductory level students, but also includes quantitative material and helpful hints for students just starting out learning quantitative atmospheric science.
A combination of Stull's text and our OER text was used in the UH Manoa atmospheric science introductory course for majors last year and this past semester. Over the course of the class, students were asked to use and to comment on the OER materials. Course participation credit was given for specific feedback and for adding additional helpful content. Through this process, we learned a lot about creating useful OER materials, as well as using it, and getting feedback from students. Furthermore, the OER materials that we created are shared online, and we encourage members of the broader community to use and give feedback and additional input to help make them even better in the future. Please find our OER text freely available online on the UH OER Repository Page.
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