Open middle problems require a higher depth of knowledge than most problems that assess procedural and conceptual understanding. They support the Common Core State Standards and provide students with opportunities for discussing their thinking. The Equivalent Ratios problem asks students to use the digits 1-9 to see how many ratios they can make that are equivalent to 2:3

Introduction to Geology students are asked to write a two page (5-6 paragraph) editorial that addresses what geology is and why it is important to society. To gather the information for their editorial, students have to interview at least five individuals (two of whom have to be professionals or faculty members), and consult the mission statements and goals of professional geology organizations (i.e. AAPG, AGU, GSA, SEPM, etc.) Students then synthesize their research and construct a well-written editorial with appropriate citations that will either explain, persuade, criticize, or praise. In completing the assignment, students not only better understand why it is good to study geology, but also have an appreciation for the scope and content of an Intro to Geology course.
Teaching Tips
Adaptations that allow this activity to be successful in an online
environment
I have not used this activity in an online environment, although students in my face-to-face class submit their assignment online through learning management software (i.e. BlackBoard, Desire2Learn, etc.).

Elements of this activity that are most effective
This is effective because it requires that students become active in the learning process, and although the writing is minimal, they have to really pay attention to their wording, point of view, and purpose. Moreover, when students interview professionals, other faculty, their parents, or friends, they are often engaged in interesting conversations that provide important insights. I have found that this helps motivate students and excites them about the content of the course.

Recommendations for other faculty adapting this activity to their
own course:
I recommend that other faculty use the content of the editorials periodically by referring back to student responses throughout the duration of their courses. It helps draw students back into the course, and helps connect them to why they are studying geology in the first place. In years when written work are less than satisfactory, I often require students to swap editorials and provide peer critiques. This usually helps students who struggle with their writing.

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Cultivating stakeholders is a critical part of event management. This application activity covers the following four-stage process for involving stakeholders in an event: identification of stakeholders, classifying stakeholders, assessing stakeholders, and maintaining stakeholders. A case study is provided for students to apply to cultivating stakeholders in an industry example.

In the market segmentation of festival attendees application activity, students will review a mini-lecture material related to market segmentation, target marketing, and event positioning. Students will then apply the concepts of marketing segmentation, target marketing, and event positioning by analyzing data collected from an international music festival to establish the target market of the international music festival.

Risk management is a critical part of event management. This worksheet covers definitions of the key aspects of risk management and the steps taken by event management in creating a risk management plan. A case study is provided for students to apply the risk management process in an industry example.

Sponsorship management is activities that an event organization engages in to secure support from sponsors and manage the interests of sponsors at the event. The organizer and sponsor are jointly interested in successfully operating events for their mutual benefit. This section provides an overview of sponsorship management for events. The differences between sponsorship and advertising were compared for their strengths and weaknesses. The sponsorship management of a social event was discussed from the prospective from the perspective of organizers and sponsors. A case study on an LGBT+ event provided a case problem for how to construct a social media sponsorship package.

In this out of class tutorial, students explore several examples of natural selection and speciation.

In the first week of the course, students are introduced to the major groups of animals and single-celled eukaryotes that comprise most of the fossil record. At that time, each student selects one group (kingdom, phylum or class) of organism to be their special "pet" group for the rest of the semester. Several assignments are then tied to these groups, including this activity, which is a writing assignment directly following the class lectures on evolution and natural selection. Students are asked to use the scholarly article database GeoRef to locate a peer-reviewed journal article that describes research on the evolution of their "pet" group (or some specific member of it). After reading the article, students must write a 2-3 page summary and critique of it, applying concepts they have learned in the course to evaluate the scientific merits of the paper. If time permits, students are also invited to spend a few minutes presenting their summary and critique during class so that the students can learn about each other's "pets".

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For this written assignment, the students outline the evolution of
whales from land dwelling animals to aquatic beasts. Rather than an
essay, they produce a detailed outline of the major modifications that
occurred during this transition, such as hearing, propulsion, shape,
limbs, and several others. They start with Start with Pakicetidae and
end with Mysticeti and Odontoceti lines. For each fossil species, they
describe the fossil, discuss the anatomic modification for living in an
aquatic environment, indicate the environment where the animal lived,
and the give the time range.

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This is a series of 5 assignments I assign outside of class time, with the purpose of getting students to explore the literature resources that are available for mineralogy. The inspiration for the exercises comes from my exasperation with the repeated questions: "Why do we have to know so many minerals?" and "What about these minerals do we have to know?" Rather than saying "Everything that is important," I hope to show students that what they need to know depends on what questions they hope to answer, and that mineralogy developed in historical context, parallel with other sciences.

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At the end of this exercise students will be able to use computer-based software to draw crystal structures and visualize symmetries present in minerals. By varying the way in which atoms or groups of atoms are displayed, they will begin to see how atoms link through bonds. Students will also begin to investigate the effects of variable composition on bonding on unit cell parameters.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This set of assignments exposes students to data which can be used to analyze economic inequality in international and historical context. Then students are asked to generate a thesis-driven argument drawing supporting evidence from one or more of the data sources.

In the essay "Mother Tongue," Amy Tan explains that she "began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with." How these "different Englishes" or even a language other than English contribute to identity is a crucial issue for adolescents.

In this lesson, students explore this issue by brainstorming the different languages they use in speaking and writing, and when and where these languages are appropriate. They write in their journals about a time when someone made an assumption about them based on their use of language, and share their writing with the class. Students then read and discuss Amy Tan's essay "Mother Tongue." Finally, they write a literacy narrative describing two different languages they use and when and where they use these languages.

Students are asked to keep a food diary for 24 hours and then asked to analyze the products they consumed in terms of the ocean resources needed to make and deliver that product. This assignment was designed to help develop ocean literacy for students learning oceanography in a landlock classroom.

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How do soils develop over time? Perhaps the best place to learn is a across a chrosequence of deposits that span a wide range in age (and appearance). If we can identify parent material and measure its chemical composition, it can be used as a benchmark for comparison with the chemical composition of soils that were formed from it. This enables us to quantify the degree of chemical depletion. In general we expect older soils to be more depleted, all else equal. But older soils might also be subject to greater physical erosion, in addition to chemical weathering. This complicates the assessment of soil development because the eroded material is no longer present.

Students are presented with two alternate hypotheses about the soils/deposits they visit:
a) the material has been weathering w/ little physical erosion since it was deposited
b) the material has been weathering and eroding since it was deposited
These hypotheses are developed in lectures before the activity and are based on principles of conservation of mass.

During their site visit, students coarsely characterize topography (@2 -- 5 m scale) for several "representative" cross sections. If time is limited this step could be done remotely (e.g., with topo maps and Google earth).

Students assess and discuss evidence for erosional (and depositional) processes since the deposits were created. They look for broad topographic signatures and measure (for example) the spatial density and material volume of tree throw and animal burrowing mounds, if present.

Students also assess and discuss evidence for in-situ weathering (e.g., development of rinds, soil texture, and mineral alteration). The idea is to train their eyes to observe and key in on any site-to-site differences.

Students dig (and discover!) at select sites. They sample soils at regular intervals from pits (with discussion of merits of different sampling approaches e.g., random vs. stratified random). Students discuss relationships in excavated pits.

A jigsaw approach would be an effective way to tackle the large number of field tasks outlined here.

Back in the lab, using literature values, students estimate weathering rates for each deposit. They compare their estimates with back-of-the-envelop estimates for physical erosion rates (based on tree throw/animal burrowing density) and literature values of diffusivity (which can be coupled with curvature measurements).

The instructor promotes discussion of the implications of differences in residence time on weathering rate estimates.

Students analyze samples by XRF; depending on the course's time constraints students are provided with geochemical data from previous year's field effort or other existing data (in this case Taylor and Blum, 1995).

Students are asked to prepare a final report focusing on the following questions: Are soils products of erosion and weathering, or are they being formed in place by weathering alone? Under what circumstances can we expect erosion to dominate over weathering and visa versa? Students first prepare figures and then use them to develop an an outline (reviewed by the instructor) for their report. Students prepare a draft and engage in peer review (one review each). Students revise their reports, based on the peer review comments, and submit their final report.
Designed for a geomorphology course

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This lesson will teach you the difference between different investments, what they are and the risk involved with each.

Children in kindergarten through fifth grade and their families are invited to learn more about the field of engineering in this hour-long special program. Family Night: Engineering introduces children to cool careers within the field of engineering that range from building roller coasters to designing artificial heart pumps for children who need them. Children will also get a chance to participate in hands-on engineering activities during the program!

The best part? Everything they need to participate can be found right in your home.

This short interactive activity has learners to manipulate fault blocks to better understand different types of earthquake-generating faults in different tectonic settings--extensional, convergent, and strike-slip. Fault models aid in visualizing and understanding faulting and plate motions because the instructor and their students can manipulate a three-dimensional model for a true hands-on experience.

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This exercise introduces students to the concept of temporal and spatial fidelity, to the different types of fossil assemblages, and how the taphonomic characteristics of an assemblage can be used to assess the relative state of fidelity. The exercise is suitable when introducing the discipline of taphonomy, typically covered near the beginning of a course in paleontology or paleobiology.

Because most universities lack appropriate collections of fossils, particularly collections from assemblages with unusual states of preservation, this exercise provides digital images of fossils from a Middle Devonian obrution deposit (or smothered assemblage) found within thin bedded limestones of the Hamilton Group of western New York State.

Students are asked to make predictions concerning the relative states of preservation likely to be found in life assemblages (biocoenoses) and death assemblages (thanatocoenoses and taphocoenoses). A biocoenosis is an assemblage that contains virtually all of the species that existed when the community was alive. A thanatocoenosis is a death assemblage where all the fossils represented existed within the community, but not all community members are present as fossils (species are missing). Finally, a taphocoenosis is an assemblage where not all species present in the community are represented as fossils, and not all the fossil species within the assemblage lived in the community (i.e., there is temporal or spatial mixing). Students are then presented with a PowerPoint presentation of the Hamilton Group strata, the limestones possessing the unusual fossil assemblage, and finally images of fossils with their preservational characteristics highlighted. The slides are annotated to provide observational descriptions and not interpretations. The exercise works best with students working in small groups with each group supplied with a laptop containing the PowerPoint presentation. Finally, each group is asked to interpret the assemblage type represented (bio-, thanato-, or taphocoenosis) and present a cogent argument citing supportive preservational evidence. (Because the assemblage is created through obrution, the assemblage is correctly interpreted as a thanatocoenosis �� the fossils present were found within the community with many individuals preserved in life position and with behaviors represented; not all species in the community, however, are preserved as fossils.)

If time allows, students could be asked to make predictions concerning the preservational characteristics expected for each assemblage type in advance of the exercise. (A table is attached that I use to help frame their predictions.) Their interpretation and evidential argument could be written up as a short essay. I've asked students to do this individually and other times as a collaborative writing assignment for the group.

Once the correct assemblage interpretation is revealed to the students, they could be asked to speculate about the mechanism leading to this style of preservation (i.e., recognizing it as an obrution deposit). A few figures are provided that are helpful in explaining obrution.

The following files are uploaded as supportive teaching materials:
1. Discussion Assemblage Types.doc: Notes to guide a discussion to acquire predictions for taphonomic characteristics for each assemblage type.
2. Fossil Assemblages Exercise.ppt: PowerPoint presentation that describes the unknown fossil assemblage.
3. Exercise Assemblage Fidelity Assignment.doc: The handout provided students describing the exercise.
4. Obrution Deposits.ppt: PowerPoint presentation explaining obrution deposits.

Students collect from two Devonian field sites. Each student works on their own collections; each genus is identified (and detailed sketches made), preservation noted, relative abundance reported; together with lithological information students are able to ascertain the mode of life of the fossils, and ascertain the depositional environment and whether these are life or death assemblages. The lab addresses the two 'content goals' of the course: assessing mode of life of an organism and determining the paleoenvironmental context.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)