The Sustainable Lawn: An Online Turfgrass Science Course for Non-Majors.

Recent advances in technology-enhanced teaching and learning allow for effective delivery of completely online courses in the applied plant sciences.   Most college students have some experience with a home lawn, and oftentimes this experience might represent the bulk of a student’s background in plant science.  ‘The Sustainable Lawn’ is a fully-online course that was designed for non-horticulture students at the University of Minnesota.  In order to incorporate the most up-to-date technologies, the course was developed as a partnership between the Department of Horticultural Science and the Learning Technologies Unit of the College of Continuing Education.  The course is delivered through Moodle, a course management system that is very user-friendly and allows for significant interactions between students.  Course content is delivered through a variety of tools including audio lectures, online discussion forums, online readings, web-based learning modules, video, and interactive Flash. In the first part of the course, students learn basic plant biology concepts and how to identify important turfgrass and weed species through the use of electronic resources and outdoor laboratory experiences.  The course then builds on foundational information with assignments and discussion focused on environmental issues related to the home lawn such as fertilizer run-off, pesticide use, and genetically-modified turfgrass.  This presentation will discuss the various tools that are used to teach this course as well as issues that have been encountered.