Executive Summary

This textbook was designed to give the students of the Maricopa Community County Colleges District a free, interactive resource to accompany the class GLG110IN: Geological Disasters and the Environment, as part of the 2020 Maricopa Open Digital (MOD) Press Grant to develop high-quality, open ebooks for the classroom and public use.

This text was developed in collaboration between Dr. Charlene Estrada (South Mountain Community College), Dr. Carolina Michel (Chandler-Gilbert Community College), and Dr. Merry Wilson (Scottsdale Community College) to better engage local students in learning hazards and issues in geosciences and environmental sciences. Additional chapters were developed by Jeff Simpson (Chandler-Gilbert Community College, Katherine Megivern (Chandler-Gilbert Community College).

This work uses a place-based pedagogy by including local examples of Arizona geology and hazards entitled “Backyard Geology” within each chapter to give students a sense of connection to the learning material. Furthermore, the text is written for a non-science major with keywords highlighted and defined within a glossary, and the text is interspersed by example images, videos, and H5P interactive assessments.

This textbook fulfills the MCCCD mission of providing access to higher education for a diverse community of learners. Videos are subtitled, and images are given alternative descriptive text. Furthermore, this resource is open and accessible to the public beyond the classroom, and materials within can be duplicated, altered, and reused with proper attribution. Unless otherwise noted within each chapter of the textbook, or in individual media, this body of work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Final Product

Dynamic Planet: Exploring Geological Disasters and Environmental Change

Contact Information

Merry Wilson: merry.wilson@scottsdalecc.edu 

Jeff Simpson: jeff.simpson@cgc.edu

Katherine Megivern: katherine.megivern@cgc.edu

Charlene Estrada

Carolina Michel

Mike Santoro

Upgrading the “Dynamic Planet” Gold Seal Pressbook to Meet All GLG110 MCCCD Course Competencies

Executive Summary

Our project, “Upgrading the “Dynamic Planet” Gold Seal Pressbook to Meet All GLG110 MCCCD Course Competencies” sought to develop information on soil and water resources. Targeting key concepts aligned with the competencies, Katherine wrote Chapter 13 Soils and Chapter 14 Water Resources and Water Pollution as planned, and Carolina designed 10+ multimedia/H5P activities. The MCCCD official course competencies that this project addressed are: “Assess and describe the impact of human behavior on selected environmental phenomena such as water resources, climate change, severe weather, and soils.”

These new chapters are aligned and consistent with the previous chapters. We referenced a number of places in or near Arizona to increase engagement and student outcomes. Our chapters highlight Indigenous cultures in keeping with this important practice begun in previous chapters. Together, these inclusions further Dynamic Planet’s contributions to place-based knowledge of Arizona.

These chapters apply to classes in the fields of physical geography, sustainability, agricultural science, biology, and environmental science, including our upcoming ENV230.
Both chapters deliver information in all sections that we proposed.

Aligned with the Release principle of the CARE Framework, our project, under the Instructor Resources sections of our Attributions and References of each chapter, includes a PDF with all the information of the chapter. Users may download the PDF and copy it into their websites or LMS.

Final Product

Dynamic Planet: Exploring Geological Disasters and Environmental Change: Chapters 13 & 14

Contact Information

Carolina Michel: carolina.michel@cgc.edu

Katherine Megivern: katherine.megivern@cgc.edu