Barriers and Opportunities In Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences Online Education.

Distance education and blended undergraduate and graduate programs in soil, water, environmental sciences, and related disciplines are growing rapidly in the U.S. and elsewhere. There are challenges to develop new courses and curricula, or adapt existing ones, to accommodate growing needs in online education. We will share experiences on development and evolution of (i) online undergraduate and graduate degree programs, (ii) graduate certificate programs, and (iii) open, collaborative education and learning focused on Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) in soil, water and environmental sciences. We will highlight technological barriers and opportunities, pedagogical issues, instructional styles, and benefits and limitations of asynchronous and synchronous communication in online educational settings. Various digital media are used to emulate online classrooms including video recordings, virtual labs, and live chats. The dialogues of faculty to learner (F-L), learner to learner (L-L), and learner to resource (L-R) are equally important. Similar to F2F settings, interaction time (F-L and L-L) is critical in virtual classrooms to foster deep learning experiences and critical thinking. We found that digital delivery of learning material (L-R) has multiple advantages over traditional text-based methods stimulating students’ learning. Online collaborative systems, such as the RLO-based EcoLearnIT platform, allow learners and faculty to team-up and learn together. We will showcase various RLOs focused on soils and wetlands which are shared online using the EcoLearnIT educational system that we developed.