Lesson Guidelines for the Geophysics Library

The goal of the Geophysics Library project is to provide open modular computational lessons for various topics in geophysics:

Open: All lesson material (including data and code) should be free to use and available under permissive licenses (CC-BY, MIT, BSD, etc). Our goals is to not only enable widespread use of this material, but also to encourage the community to help develop and maintain it.

Modular: Lessons/activities should be designed to be taught in a single session (~1-3 hours) and cover a specific topic (e.g., a case study, regional isostasy models, etc). This maximizes the usability of the material across different courses, which can vary a lot depending on instructor preferences/styles.

Computational: Lessons should involve some form of computation that students can follow and/or perform for themselves (implementing a model, plotting a dataset, etc). Knowledge is easily accessible through internet searches and text books. But open-source computational tools enable students to put their knowledge into practice through interactive exploration and looking at real world data.

Lesson types

Our lessons that fall under these main categories:

1. Core concepts: Exploring a geophysical concept from the point of view of available data, models, geologic/geodynamic context, etc. Examples: apparent resistivity in ERT surveys, upward continuation of potential field data, linear inversion, cooling of the oceanic lithosphere.
2. Case studies: An example of using geophysics to understand the world (or a world). Can be taken from the literature or exploring a particular application that illustrates a core concept. Ideally, case studies should use open data and open-source software. Examples: lithospheric flexure in Hawai'i from bathymetry and gravity anomalies, reproducing results from a paper or textbook using open tools/data.
3. Tutorials: How to use an open-source tool to accomplish a task. These lessons would focus on teaching the tool rather than teaching the concepts behind it (which would ideally be done in a core concepts lesson). Examples: loading seismic data with segyio, DC resistivity inversion with SimPEG, Euler deconvolution with harmonica.

What do you mean by "lesson"?

Our lessons include text describing theory/background, code that can be run by students to explore a geophysical model/dataset, topics for discussion, a brief lesson plan, etc. The content can vary depending on lesson type.

Each lesson is developed and distributed in an individual git repository that contains:

• README.md: Description of the lesson, including learning objectives, prerequisites, data description, instructions for running the lesson, and links to the lesson plan, contributing guide, related lessons, etc.
• LICENSE.md: The license for the content.
• LESSON_PLAN.md: A bullet point guide for instructors explaining how to use the lesson, activities that can be performed (e.g., group activities, exercises), and examples of formative assessment (multiple choice questions, discussion points, etc).
• CONTRIBUTING.md: Guide for contributing to the lesson. Ideally should just point to this repository.
• AUTHORS.md: A list of lesson authors and contributors. Anyone who has contributed to the lesson should be included (name, affiliation, links, ORCID, etc). This would be used to determine authorship in publications of this lesson material.
• data/: Folder with all required data for this lesson, if it's small enough to be stored on GitHub. A data/README.md file should be included describing the data sources (with appropriate citations), links, and license information.
• Code in the form of scripts, Jupyter notebooks, etc.
• Extra material required for the lesson: question sheets, images, reading material, etc.

For an example of what this could look like, see the gravity disturbance lesson.

Technology

TODO: How lessons are setup on GitHub: repositories, environments, notebooks, proprietary vs open, etc.

Contributing

TODO: How to contribute to an existing lesson.

TODO: How to create a new lesson.

License

You are free to reuse, share, and modify the contents of this lesson under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and the BSD-3-clause license (see LICENSE.md for details).