Prepared for delivery as keynote address at the International Symposium: "The Learning Society and the Water-Environment", Paris France 2-4 June 1999.

An interdisciplinary Internet course on Global Change for present and future decision-makers

EUGENE S. TAKLE, MICHAEL R. TABER, DOUGLAS FILS
International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa USA 50011

ABSTRACT. We have developed an Internet-based university course addressing issues of global environmental change. The course provides access to recent scientific literature and structured learning activities on a wide range of global environmental issues. An electronic dialog allows on-line discussion organized by topic. A web-based laboratory allows students to test hypotheses and conceptual models by accessing and running a research-quality model of soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions. Each student has a personalized password-protected electronic portfolio for managing all interaction with the course and the laboratory. A global learning resource network has been established to facilitate multi-directional flow of information and ideas from many countries on global change issues.

Cours interdisciplinaire avec l'Internet sur le changement global destin aux d'cideurs d'aujourd'hui et de demain.

EUGENE S. TAKLE, MICHAEL R. TABER, DOUGLAS FILS
International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa 50011

SOMMAIRE. Nous avons mis au point un cours universitaire bas sur l'Internet traitant du changement global relatif l'environnement. Le cours permet un acces la litterature scientifique recente et d es activites d'apprentissage structures traitant sur une grande gamme des questions globales et environnementales. Un dialogue electronique permet un discours relie e l'informatique classe par theme. Un laboratoire cree e partir du reseau mondial permet aux etudiants d e tester des hypotheses et des schemas conceptuels en ayant acces et en executant un schema d'un tres haut niveau scientifique des interaction s entre le sol, la vegetation et l'atmosphere. Chaque etudiant a un portefeuille electronique protege par un mot de passe personnalise p our gerer toutes les interactions avec le cours et le laboratoire. Un reseau fournissant des moyens pour l'apprentissage global a ete etab li pour faciliter l'echange des informations dans plusieurs directions et des idees, provenant de nombreux pays sur les questions du changement global.

INTRODUCTION

The spherical shell of less than 10 km thickness at the surface of planet Earth is unique in that only here does water exist in abundance in all three phases. Solar illumination of this fragile, water-rich shell has given rise to the only known place in the universe for life as we know it. From the philosophical considerations of the origin of life to the practical need for washing dinner plates, water permeates every element of human existence. Professor G. O. P. Obasi, in an address to the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Dallas Texas (USA) (Obasi, 1999) reported that freshwater resources now have fallen below the 1000 m3 annual per capita level (a common benchmark for water scarcity) in 22 countries, and that pressure on the world's water resources will continue to increase. Freshwater shortage and water quality will be dominant problems in the next century and may jeopardize all other efforts to secure sustainable development (Obasi, 1999).

Almost 20 years ago the U.S. government intelligence services estimated that there were at least 10 locations in the world where war could break out over dwindling shared water resources (Starr, 1991). Starr goes on to point out that the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 40,000 children worldwide (mostly on the African continent) are dying every day from hunger or disease caused by lack of water or from contaminated water and that by the end of this century (less than one year), almost 40% of the African population will be at risk of death or disease from water scarcity or contamination.

There is need for authoritative information on rapidly evolving international, national, and local dimensions of water issues and the role of water in the larger issue of global environmental change and global sustainable development. This need requires networks of researchers and educators to transform research results into educational materials appropriate for multiple-target audiences and available over the Internet. We have developed an Internet Global Change course for senior university undergraduates and beginning graduate students covering a broad range of topics in the general area of global environmental change, including a unit on water issues.

ACCESS TO INFORMATION

The gravity of global environmental problems, including availability of adequate supplies of safe water, calls for prompt international action. However, not all nations have equally timely access to information relating to the scope and magnitude of changes, of both natural and anthropogenic origin, occurring in our global environment. As a consequence, scientists may not have adequate time to evaluate the impact of changes or the political response to these changes for their own countries. For a number of reasons, global change materials, including materials on water, are not always accessible to instructors in university courses in a timely manner. In some cases, access to research reports is limited due to cost of journals. In other cases, instructors, facing increased pressure to do more instruction with fewer resources, do not have the time to keep abreast of rapid advances outside their own specialty. Because of the closely linked relationships of different components of the earth system, however, graduates of our universities will increasingly be involved in careers that bring them into multi-disciplinary issues of global change. This creates a need for improved communication among students from different disciplines and different geographic regions, particularly for addressing the policy and human dimensions of global environmental change.

We have developed a Global Change course on the Internet for senior undergraduates and beginning graduate students. The course also would be suitable for practitioners and decision-makers seeking an overview of how the water environment is interconnected with all global change issues. Parts of the course have been used for introductory environmental science courses at other universities and colleges. And numerous e-mail messages and Internet requests indicates it is being used by high-school students, writers, government researchers, publishers, and many others.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Objectives of the Global Change course are: (a) to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the earth's environmental system and to explore the scientific evidence for changes in the global environment, (b) to instill in students the value of peer-reviewed literature on global-change issues, and (c) to engage students, by means of the Internet, in dialog among themselves, with outside experts, and with students from other countries on the scientific, economic, social, political, and ethical implications of these global changes.

The course consists of 3 blocks each having 13 individual but interconnected learning units spanning the spectrum of global change issues. Each learning unit consists of a set of objectives, a learning narrative (transcript of a conventional lecture) including images and links to other information sources, a quiz over the learning narrative that is automatically and instantaneously graded and recorded, links to other related sites, a link to the search engine for the Iowa State University Library, a "question to ponder" as a post-classtime discussion starter, and a link to a publicly available post-classtime electronic dialog on the learning unit topic. Some units have interactive on-line experiments for student to complete and report results.

Students manage their interaction with the course through their personal Internet portfolios in which are archived all their electronic submissions, instructor's grades and comments, and responses of other students, faculty, or others to electronic dialog comments. Students' reviews of research papers are posted on the web and linked where appropriate to learning narratives. Cooperative learning is implemented through summaries, created and posted on the web by small groups, of classtime presentations and discussion. These serve as a catalyst to facilitate post-classtime discussion.

The interactive Internet-based electronic dialog provides an organized framework for student discussion on each of the 42 Global Change topics. Students enter questions, comments, newfound information, new websites pertinent to the topic, and responses to other students.=20 Outside experts are invited to enter the dialog by answering student questions and pose questions for students to ponder. Dialog from each class is archived and made available to later classes. This allows future students to take advantage of particular interchanges, especially with outside experts. An ancillary advantage of the student electronic dialog, particularly for international implementations, is that students from several countries are able to dialog with other students on trans-national issues such as water policy. The class environment allows students from several countries to explore the concept of collective and enlightened self-interest related to regional and global environmental problems. These discussions can build understanding and friendship among students who eventually assume positions of leadership in science and government in their respective countries, that may contribute to more effective resolution of future international water issues.

ON-LINE LABORATORY

Learning is enhanced if students have access to interactive tools that allow hypothesis testing and concept evaluation. Some physical processes, such as components of the hydrological cycle, are complex and not easily visualized or conceptualized by simple diagrams or numerical relationships. For instance, the evapotranspiration of water from plants depends on meteorological conditions, soil conditions, and structure and phenological stage of the plants. A complete description of how water is cycled through atmosphere, soil, and plant requires information about the physical and biological processes for the plant, physics of water movement in soils, transport of water vapor in the atmosphere, and how direct and diffuse solar and infrared radiation are distributed within the plant canopy. So-called soil-vegetation-atmosphere-transfer (SVAT) numerical models capture these processes and are now being used as submodels for global and regional climate models for studying climate change (Sellers, et al 1986; Sellers et al, 1996).

A prototype on-line laboratory has been developed to accompany the Global Change course. In our present implementation of this laboratory, students access over the web, through their portfolios, a research-quality SVAT model, SiB2 (Sellers et al, 1986), resident on a computer workstation at our institute. The student performs a prescribed but open-ended set of experiments to examine atmosphere-soil-biosphere-hydrosphere interactions, with input and output (including graphical material) being managed through the online portfolio.

GLOBAL LEARNING RESOURCE NETWORK

Water issues are regional and global, and understanding water issues requires information on a variety of meteorologic, hydrologic, geographic, technical, cultural, and political topics. Information originating in a particular country may not be applicable in other countries due to cultural, geographic, or political reasons. Solutions to trans-national water problems require international teams of scientists and decision-makers that are fully informed of the latest research and technical information and who have the mutual understanding and cultural awareness to achieve workable solutions. A goal of the Global Change course is to establish a Global Learning Resource Network of global change information and people as a managed but organic network for multi-directional flow of information and ideas relating to global environmental issues. The first step in forming this network was taken in September and October 1998 when a team of 13 Latin American university faculty members assembled at Iowa State University for a planning meeting. This team developed the topology for dissemination of the Global Change course and began translating the Global Change course to Spanish and Portuguese for coordinated delivery in 16 Central and South American countries belonging to the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). Wide and multi-lingual delivery is expected to begin in Fall 1999. To be truly effective, this global network needs wide representation from both developed and developing countries. Additional participating countries are being sought for this network.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Development and implementation of the course and extension to Latin American universities is supported under funding from Iowa State University, UNESCO, the US National Science Foundation, the Global Environmental Facility, and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. Particular acknowledgment for the Latin American extension is given to Prof. Eduardo Banus, Director of the Project RLA/92/G34 - IAI/UNDP/GEF/WMO who provided, not only funding for the Latin American workshop, but perhaps more importantly a vision for the multi-directional network.

REFERENCES

Obasi, G. O. P., 1999: Hydrology and water resources: A global challenge for WMO. 14th Conference on Hydrology, American Meteorological Society, Dallas, Texas, 10-15 January 1999, 330-332.

Sellers, P. J., Y. Mintz, Y. C. Sud, A. Dalcher, 1986: A simple biosphere model (SiB) for use within general circulation models. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 43, 505-531.

Sellers, P. J., D. A. Randall, G. J. Collatz, J. A. Berry, C. B. Field, D. A. Dazlich, C. Zhang, G. D. Collelo, and L. Bounoua, 1996: A revised land surface parameterization (SiB2) for atmospheric GCMs. Part I: Model formulation. Journal of Climate 9, 676-705.

Starr, J. R. 1991: Water wars. Foreign Policy 82 (Spring), 17-36.