Narrative
ESC 2000, The Blue Planet, is an IFP course in Earth Science with an annual enrollment of about 1,000 students and offered in an online only format. Typically, large IFP courses focus on memorizing facts and repeating them back on multiple-choice tests and this is particularly true for large online courses. However, engaging students using data is an important step toward inquiry about scientific questions and forms the foundation of scientific research.
In 2018/19, ESC 2000 received a FAU Curriculum Grant to develop new, student centered, data driven Google Earth Pro based assignments to replace current assignments that are primarily focused on recall and memorization. With Google Earth Pro, “it is possible to explore the world and learn a bit about how it all fits together from a variety of different lenses." Google Earth is a familiar platform to many students and "presents, in a geospatial context, a great deal of information that applies to topics ranging from natural sciences to social sciences, history, art, engineering and most other topics that have a geographic component." By examining data on a three-dimensional model of the Earth, students better develop an understanding of the Earth system. Source: https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/earth/education/faq/
Students are excited with the new Google Earth Pro investigations and they are much more inquisitive about the course topics because of them. However, many students today do not have traditional computers, but instead use Chromebooks and tablets that are not compatible with installing Google Earth Pro. For this reason, this tech fee proposal seeks to purchase a grid based Nvidia GPU to install in an existing Geosciences server to support these students online through FAU’s VirtualApps Citrix system. This GPU will enable the existing server to support the required Open GL and DirectX graphics needs of Google Earth Pro, which is not available on any current OIT Citrix servers.
