OpenStax Astronomy

Hi Steve,

  I teach Astro in a compressed January term.  The term is four weeks long with four days per week (minus holidays like New Year's Day & MLK Day).  I have attached my lecture schedule.  

   Note: I do not cover every topic to the same depth as I would in a 15 week semester.  Students need time between lectures to digest material and 'construct knowledge' (or whatever the ed-wonks say these days ;).  Also, this is a GE course and our dept has a focus on inspiring students.

    I tried to attach a file but this system is too clunky and I have to rush to class.   PM me and I'll send you a PDF!

Thank you!  Yes, that is helpful.  We're jumping in next year without a full planned formed and will tweak it every year.  My class is a science elective for any student in 11th or 12th grade.  I know it won't have the depth of a full semester, but I would like to make it interesting and fun.  I agree, the lack of time for digestion and synthesis is a problem.  I'm hoping to make it more experiential in the future with a couple of overnight trips to local observatories or colleges with astronomy programs.  Thanks again!

Dear Steve:

I would suggest that you also post your question on the Facebook groups on astronomy education, especially the ones for high school teachers: Teaching Astronomy AND Astronomy Teachers.  You might want to do hands-on astronomy activities with them, with lecture sequences woven in. OpenStax Astronomy has, as you might have seen, suggestions for small group activities in each chapter. In the OER site for the book, where we are corresponding, I have also put a subject index to lab activities that are free on the web, and a subject index, chapter by chapter, of short videos that can be shown in introductory classes. 

Your friendly textbook author,

Andrew Fraknoi

Thank you, Dr. Fraknoi.  I will do that.  I just wanted to post here first because I use this book in my class and was hoping someone had something specific to this text.  The students buy their own books at my school and I'm trying to keep the costs down as much as possible.  

Hi Steve, 

I teach a year long high school astronomy course at a Nebraska high school. Is your school one-to-one for computers or do you have access to a classroom laptop cart? If you do there are a lot of resources including simulations on UNL's astronomy education site https://astro.unl.edu/ which might be helpful.

I also use the program stellarium a lot. They have both a download at https://stellarium.org/ or a web based version at https://stellarium-web.org/

All of these are free and I use them with my students quiet a bit. 

I teach a 4-week session, but it is also fully online which is a bit different than having students for such a long period each day. It also focuses on planetary astronomy so I cover Chapters 1-16, 21, & 30 in the textbook. Winter Syllabus - This is a link to my winter syllabus from this past year. I essentially cover everything that I would in a full semester. However, I do warn students registering that they will need to be able to spend 30-40 hours per week on the class! For labs, I use some of the PhET simulations as well as the NAAP labs from the University of Nebraska. These could be used as activities to break up time between lecture. Another idea is to get the students involved - have them present on topics either individually or in groups. (I don't use this in my online classes, but it has worked in traditional classes!) Again, it helps break things up instead of lecturing for too long. I have my students read an article from Sky and Telescope and report on that. This could be a good way to incorporate some new findings. If it helps, I have a set of lecture slides and lecture videos linked to in the OER Commons here which others have found useful. I an working on updating these for the second edition now and will have those available here once completed which shoudl be mid-May for the slides if all goes well!

Hi Steve,

I was asked by my community college to teach a five-week Winter term version of my one-semester Intro to Astronomy class. Unfortunately enrollment was low and the section was canceled, but I still had to do all the initial planning of the class.

I try to keep costs to zero and use Dr. Fraknoi's list of freely available activities in addtion to using Astronomy, 2e. Having said that, it can be a challenge depending on available equipment. My full-semester class (as well as the Winter term class) is all-online and asynchronous. I have no control over what computer students plan to use for coursework. That's a challenge since some students are high school students using district computers and some use Chromebooks. They have no administrator privileges to install apps and Stellarium does not play well with Chromebooks. Depending on your situation, you may consider looking at OpenStax' partner Starry Night and having students get the individual web-based version (about $30 for a year's access) since classroom licenses are pricey.

Here's what I planned for the Winter term (including the activities I currently use in my full-semester course):

• Use the "Inclusive Short Course, Planets at the End" course outline for Astronomy, 2e for the shorter class.
• Make extensive use of the list of freely available activities compiled by Dr. Fraknoi
• Use Stellarium for many activities and employ the Colorado Mountain College activites for Learning Stellarium, Observing the Sky, Kepler's Laws, Phases of the Moon, Eclipses, and the H-R Diagram. Because of the asynchronously all-online format, I've had to modify activities and write instructions so students can work more or less independently with no immediate help/feedback.
• Used Vassilios Spathopoulos' (Glasgow International College) activity to explore the work of Eratosthenes
• I use the ESA/ESO activities to find the distance to M100 and mass of Sgr A*.
• MicroObservatory is great for learning about astronomical image processing. Students love this activity. They use JS9-4L to process images (or could use NOIRLab's FITS Liberator pair with Photoshop). They can request their own images with MicroObervatory or use the MAST archive of HST and JWST images.
• Use the University of Washington's lab on stellar spectra
• Use NMSU's activity on Hubble's law and the cosmic distance scale

I ask students to write a couple of lab reports and also wrap up the course with making an academic poster and a poster fair/sharing period.

As time goes by, I would like to add more "gamified" activities to my semester-long course as well as the Winter term if asked to teach it again. For example, activities such as creating travel posters; library or science museum exhibits,  mission blog or crewmember log entries; informational videos; opportunities to teach children, family members, classmates, etc. about course topics. 

I hope this helps. 
Brent

Thanks for all the advice!  I apologize for disappearing after I posted the original question.  We have a teacher who had to take extended leave due to illness and we're scrambling to cover their classes, so my workload increased by 25%.  But, the good news is that the school has pushed back starting the mini-mester for another year to allow us all to develop curricula.  So now I can be more circumspect about what all the course should look like.  

Thank you all again!