A New Online Text for Introductory-Level Atmospheric Science Students

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. In the past, our Atmospheric Science department's introductory class used Ahren’s “Essentials of Meteorology” textbook and was supplemented with equations and other quantitative material in lecture. However, this left the students with no concrete resource for the quantitative parts we expected of them - the same parts that became much more complicated later, and were really the backbone of future courses. We needed a better method. We needed a textbook that taught the students what we needed them to know and gave them the examples and descriptions of equations. Unable to find one in existence, we created our own.

We paired up with Roland Stull's already available OER textbook which is freely available online. Stull's text is quantitative and algebra-based, but it is incredibly comprehensive and in fact a bit too comprehensive for an introductory level class. We kept our OER chapters the same as Stull's so that if students want additional information or further reading they can read his text and it will expand on our basic concepts. But, they don't necessarily need to read more because our text provides everything they need to know for our class. We subsequently used our text in the UHManoa atmospheric science introductory course for majors the past three fall semesters. Over the course of each semester, students were asked to use and to comment on the OER materials. Course participation credit was given for specific feedback. 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. Alternatively, if you want to adapt this OER to your course, you can! You can fork it just like github and modify it to cover the information you want to teach.

Check it out here: http://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/atmo/