The University of Alabama has been part of a three-year Earth System Science project providing coursework online to graduate students.
NASA funded the program for $100,000. The overall goal of the project was to gauge the feasibility and practicality of various colleges and universities jointly instructing (distributed teaching) a science course online to reach a wider number of students nationwide. The course, which centered on interrelationships of the Earth’s systems (hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere), could reach many institutions in different states that had small numbers of students capable of taking the course, but lacked a conceivable way to teach it on their own campuses.
Dr. Dennis Sunal, UA professor of secondary education, played a key role in the University’s involvement in the venture. “NASA wanted to determine the effects on graduate students of variations in key variables in online delivery of a fully Web-based design course,” Sunal said. “Not only were we able to teach the course nationwide, but also to students in South America. Web-teaching is a new development over the last 10 years, and NASA wants to optimize online learning through research and development to effectively incorporate science education over the Web into higher education.”
The course was taught on four separate occasions over a three-year period in cooperation with the University of Idaho and Kansas State University and concluded in September 2003.