NOST 216 - International Polar Year - Course information
Second-year course to be offered online 2 February 2009 to 3 May 2009.
Now an officially endorsed IPY project (EoI 1260) that's part of the UArctic IPY Education and Outreach project.
This is a second-year-level multidisciplinary course that introduces the context
and promise of the Fourth International Polar Year (IPY)
(2007-2008), a two-year program of science, research and education
focussed on the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Readings, writing
assignments and discussions place this important 24-month period of
intense research activity into the larger polar and pure-science
research context. This course would be of interest to individuals
working in government, media or business who seek to understand this
international enterprise a bit better. In addition, students of the
North, history, science, or contemporary issues should find the course
interesting. (Click the course outline link at left to see the pdf of
the outline.)
This
course is being offered asynchronously online, which means that there
are no set meeting times beyond probable Skype chat sessions. Several
visits to the course site a week will be needed to keep up with the
discussions and readings. Even though we've offered this course three time, it is still a fairly new course and it's a new
perspective on the topic. There will, therefore, be no single textbook.
Instead, a variety of online and suggested print resources are going to
be used to provide us with the basis for our discussions. Additional
time will be needed to work through the supplied and suggested
materials.
The course is being conducted using a Course
Management System called Moodle. The course site is private and will
require logging in. Services on the course site include e-mail,
discussion forums, chat (using Skype), a collection of resources, etc.
To consolidate the work in the course, we will be contributing to a class "wiki," a collaborative online "book," that will serve as a reference and the basis of a text.
During
the course, I hope to invite some of the people who have been involved
in IPY4 planning and organizing to join our discussions. Their
contributions will certainly make the course exciting and current.
If this description appeals to you and you would like to take the course, you are invited to contact Amanda Graham at Yukon College (use the contact form or write to agraham at yukoncollege dot yk dot ca). Tuition is $150 CDN (VISA and MasterCard are accepted by phone, fax or in person). Application fees are waived. If you would like to take the course but are not sure about having time to complete the graded work, you may audit the course. The fee is the same.
The next course will begin on 2 February 2009. We can accept late registrations only until 6 February. Yukon College hopes to offer this course again in September 2009, so if you can't take it now, you might have an opportunity to take it later.
Here's a Flash version of the outline if you don't want to open the pdf file.
