On-Line Teaching in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

This presentation will cover our experiences with on-line teaching of two courses in the Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences Department (NRES) at the University of Illinois. We taught NRES 102, Introduction to Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences to 250 students as an 8-week asynchronous class thru our campus course management software known as “Compass”. The class took full advantage of the features of Compass and included discussions, quizzes, and writing assignments. All of these instructional materials were automatically released and withdrawn from the Compass lab sites to encourage the students to keep up with the Power Point slides from each of 31 lectures. These lectures slides were augmented by using the notes section, where what the instructor typically said about the slide in a lecture was written out. Students interacted with 6 discussions that generated much interest. The only face to face meetings were at the two midterm and final exam that were given on paper in a classroom; everything else was electronic only. The second course is NRES 201, Introduction to Soil Science. This is offered state-wide to community college students as a blended on-line class. The lecture materials are presented via Compass as Power Point slides, as are quizzes, assignments, and discussion sessions. Once a week there is a 1.5 hr. synchronous session via “Elluminate”, a virtual classroom software package, where the materials are reviewed and the students have an opportunity to interact with the instructor. In addition, there are two, on-campus, face to face day-long lab sessions to augment the asynchronous lab assignments the students do off-campus. Students responded well to both of these models with similar performance as regular face to face teaching methods.