We are so lucky to have a spiffy new telescope that has captured the public imagination over the summer! 

I used the first group of five images (one is really a spectrum, but for simplicity, I’ll refer to them all as images here!) to introduce the course to my Astro101 students this semester, and it was a hit!  Many of them had heard about the images over the summer, and a few had seen them.  But most of them, while they might have understood a particular image, hadn’t put the grouping together to ‘see the bigger picture’, which is that these five images span the history of the universe from shortly after it began to now.

I presented them in this order:

SMACS 0723 (the Webb Deep Field) I used this image to introduce the concept of the Universe as a whole object of a certain age, which has an observable size limited by that age.  I introduced a number of questions that I know my students would have, and promised to answer them once they’ve learned a few more things along the way…

Stephan’s Quintet This visual grouping of five galaxies includes a number of the signatures of interactions between galaxies, such as starburst regions and tidal tails. It’s a handy image to show to introduce the idea that the universe is not static, that even galaxies evolve over time.

Carina Nebula A nearby star-forming region starts to bring the discussion closer to home in both space and time. I’m often bemused to find that student do not know that stars are not eternal. This is a great image to show to talk about how stars form, and how we build that story from pictures like these.

Southern Ring Nebula  Stars are “born”, and they also “die”. When they die, they enrich the galaxy with the elements that form new stars, new planets, and sometimes people.

WASP-96 b I found a nice segue from the Southern Ring Nebula (all about elements in the galaxy) to detecting those elements using a spectrum like this one! Later in the course, they will find out more about how to read such an image, but for now it’s enough to be absolutely staggered that it’s possible to know that there is water in the atmosphere of a planet that orbits another star!

I’ll give a bit more information and background on these images in the next few blog posts, but presenting them on Day One, as a sort of “movie trailer” for the course turned out to be a great way to inspire students to ask questions, get talking, and be motivated to continue on.

I finished with a sketching activity which I have picked up and modified from a workshop I attended years ago. I show the students the image, and then have them sketch it 3 times: once in 15 seconds, once in 30 seconds, and once in three minutes.  By the third time they sketch the object, they are beginning to see things that they didn’t see in the first few seconds.  This emphasizes that sometimes they just need to slow down to understand or appreciate the material—a lesson I am always trying to teach! 

By Tabitha Buehler (University of Utah)

I consider my introductory astronomy class (The Universe) at the University of Utah to be an active-learning class. To me, this means that my students don’t sit and passively listen to a lecture for the entire class period—I sprinkle in activities that engage their senses besides hearing among short bits of lecture. Alongside others, these activities include two-minute writing reflections, think-pair-share clicker questions, group worksheet activities, and get-up-out-of-your-chair-and-do-something activities. My students and I particularly enjoy the latter type, and I try to incorporate them when I feel that we have the time. Two of these activities are what I would call explorations—one of which examines the Earth-Moon distance, and the other the H-R Diagram.

Earth-Moon Distance Exploration

I like to both begin and end the semester of my class with the theme, so eloquently stated by Douglas Adams, that “space is big.” In class, we discuss unfathomably large (and, sometimes, small) sizes and distances that it really gets near impossible to have a feel for the true scale of things. This first-day-of-class activity is an attempt to begin to impress upon students the scale of astronomical sizes and distances.

Supplies needed:

• Cutouts of the Earth and Moon, size-scaled; 1 of each per group

Intended Learning Outcome:

• Relate the size of the Earth, the size of the Moon, and the Earth-Moon distance

I divide my class into groups of four and give each group a cutout of the Earth and a cutout of the Moon. I ask them to do this activity without looking anything up online. I tell my students that the sizes of the Earth and Moon are at the correct scale with respect to each other. I give the groups about three minutes to guesstimate how far apart they think the pair of worlds is with respect to their sizes and to place them at appropriate distances apart somewhere in the classroom. I get a wide range of distance estimates, and, after the students look around the room at the guesses of all of the groups, they are curious to know the answer! I then reveal that the Moon is about 30 Earth-diameters away from the Earth and ask for a volunteer group to set their Earth and Moon at this distance for everyone to see. Most students are surprised at how far apart the Earth and the Moon are.

For remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, I adapted this activity in such a way that it would also be useful to an instructor who wanted to devote less time to it or did not have a large enough space for it. For the adaptation, I created a multiple-choice question that could be used as a think-pair-share activity or could still be discussed and answered by a four-person group. The question asks, “Which of the following images (Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, and Figure 4) best represents the Earth-Moon distance?”

H-R Diagram Exploration

My motivation behind creating this activity was to allow students to discover the elegance of the H-R diagram. This was partly because I wasn’t detecting the same level of excitement from my students that I feel (and try to share) when we would discuss the H-R diagram.

Supplies needed:

• Whiteboard space for each group
• At least one whiteboard marker for each group
• A table that lists stars, sizes (small, medium, large), solar luminosities, and surface temperatures
• Cutouts of circles of different sizes and colors to match the stars in the table; 1 set for each group
• Scotch tape for each group

Intended Learning Outcomes:

• Find the position of a star on the H-R diagram based on its luminosity and surface temperature
• Identify trends in stellar characteristics among a group of stars plotted on an H-R diagram

I have done this activity twice so far, and both times I did it before we had an in-class discussion of the H-R diagram. My students were supposed to have read about the H-R diagram before coming to class that day, but it might be interesting to do this activity before they even do the reading. Either way, it sounded like it was still new enough to my students that they still experienced a nice level of exploration.

I divide my class into groups of four and give them the supplies they will need. I show them this blank plot of an H-R diagram and ask them to recreate it on their whiteboards. I give them about 15 minutes to do this, and, after, I prompt them to use the scotch tape to plot the circles they are given on the H-R diagram based on the stars in the table. When they are done plotting, I ask them to discuss with their groups to see if they can spot any trends in their diagrams. I ask for volunteers to share the trends that they find with the class.

In the two times that I’ve done this activity, I actually observed some enthusiasm regarding these trends, as my students discovered them for themselves! We then commenced a discussion of luminosity, surface temperature, size, main-sequence mass, and (briefly) evolutionary trends in the diagram. I do not discuss cluster ages until a little later in the semester, after we have gone through stellar evolution in more detail. For my next use of this activity, I intend to add a follow-up assessment that would include multiple-choice, think-pair-share questions regarding stellar characteristics on the H-R diagram.

I also adapted this activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which I put each student group into a Zoom breakout room and had them share a Zoom whiteboard. They worked together to recreate the blank H-R diagram plot and drew their own colored circles on the plot to represent the stars in the table.

My students have responded positively to both of these activities, and I am eager to more thoroughly assess the intended learning outcomes of the second activity, in particular, for future semesters. I hope you and your students enjoy these active-learning explorations as well!

By Stacy Palen

Apropos of the last few posts by Ana Larson about online classes and cheating (Thanks, Ana!), this week, I’m working on my Astro101 midterm.

It’s important to state up front that I think the purpose of exams varies from course to course. In Astro101, I think the purpose of exams is to make students look back over the last several weeks and connect different concepts across the material. For Astro101, the review is the goal, as far as I’m concerned. Therefore, I design my exams to guide them to do that review in a fun and engaging new context. In contrast, in a different course, such as Physics with Calculus, I have other goals, and they really need that material to be quickly accessible and at their fingertips for the next course. I design those exams differently, and I ask them to do the review on their own and then take the exam.

Historically, my Astro101 exams are story exams. I plunk students down on desert islands or in zombie apocalypses or some other contrived (and not entirely realistic) situation, and ask them to solve astronomy puzzles in order to survive. They might need to be able to tell time by the phase of the Moon, or find out whether it’s before or after the vernal equinox by judging the position of the rising Sun against the (formerly determined) position of Orion’s belt. I’m always bemused that students tell me that they think these exams are fun and practical.

I give students several days to do them, because they really do need to read the question and then think about it for a while—in this particular class, I’m not interested in whether they can do things quickly. And they can use any resources they have except other people.

But the things that I really like about these exams is that they are:

1. Motivating: Students want to figure them out for themselves…because how could they ever know if they could survive the zombie apocalypse otherwise?!
2. Fun: Students like to take them. Truly. They talk about them to their friends, and I usually get questions on the first day of class about whether I’m going to do this kind of exam again. Sometimes, even in other courses, if a student took Astro101 with me, they’ll ask if “we are going to have fun exams or normal exams.”
3. Fast to Grade: I have students draw pictures to answer a lot of the questions, which I can then grade out of a scale of three in less than a few seconds. For example, if the answer is first quarter, the Moon, Earth, and Sun are present and in the right orientation (3); they are all there, but drawn for third quarter (2); they are not all there or are in a completely different orientation, but they still drew something (1); or they did not answer the question at all (0). It typically takes me a full day (8-10 hours) to grade 120 exam papers because these picture questions take virtually no time to grade.
4. Easy to Change, from One Semester to the Next: For example, I give them some data about the altitude of Polaris and ask whether they need to go north or south to reach a certain point. I can change that altitude, and people who are looking up answers online will not notice. So if I get last semester’s answer, I know to separate that exam to a different pile for…careful study. Or maybe they notice that this year it’s different. But to know why that difference matters, and give the correct answer, requires processing the material. And that meets my goal.
5. Difficult to Cheat, Given My Goals: If I make them draw pictures in their own hand, then at some point, the information went through their brain, so some of it will stick. I’m satisfied because it meets my goal that they need to review the material and apply it in a new context. Because that’s my goal, I’m not bothered about how they go about it.

This semester, I hesitated all weekend about whether to send them the zombie apocalypse midterm. It seemed…insensitive, maybe…or just too stressfully close to reality. But then I made a joke of it, instead: It’s 2020—of course there will be zombie apocalypse! I bet they LOL and dive right in.

By Stacy Palen

Typically, in a F2F class, I use the workbook one day per week. In general, I do this on Friday. For each workbook activity, I’ll usually spend about five to ten minutes introducing the topic and pointing out places where students might get stuck or need a reminder. My astronomy course for fall is not synchronous, so I don’t expect that students will be logged in and working together, or that they will all be working on the activity at the same time.

I truly believe that these learning-by-doing experiences are critical to student learning. We’ve all had the experience of thinking we understood the material until we tried to actually apply it! The workbook exercises are designed with typical student difficulties in mind…so how do I do activities online, when students will likely be working alone, and I won’t be there to help them?

The first thing I need for each activity is a video mini-lecture that students can watch before they begin. I can address the same issues here that I would ordinarily address in the first few minutes of class. If I manage to keep it extra-short, like two minutes, they might even watch it more than once as they work their way through the activity and answer their own questions! I’ve begun creating these videos for the activities I’ll be using this fall, and I’ve shared the first one with you here so that you can take a look and see if it is useful to you.

I plan to set up weekly student hours in Canvas. These are times when students can arrange an “appointlet” with me. (That’s a new word, apparently, for the quick, five-minute interventions on Zoom or similar.) I am using the same time blocks for all of my classes. Still on my To-Do list is learning to use the scheduler in Canvas to see if that has all the functions I need.

Finally, each week, I will open a Discussion thread about the workbook activity due that Friday. This is a place where I can make note of things students found confusing and where students can ask questions.

Students will take pictures of their lab and submit it as a PDF in Canvas. There are a number of free apps that students can use to do this. I’ll grade the submissions in Canvas on my iPad. (Not to sell you on this particular set of products; others probably work similarly!) I’ve been doing this with upper-division assignments for a while now, so I don’t think that it will take me more time than usual to grade their work. In the first week, I expect to do a LOT of tech support.

At least I have a plan now. I don’t expect it to entirely survive the first few weeks of class. As Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are nothing, but planning is everything.” I’m trying to keep that in mind as we approach the fall semester. I’m sure you are, too!

By Stacy Palen

As I think about what I usually do in lecture, in order to try to capture some of it for the online experience, a few book-related things come to mind. There are a few things I do for each chapter, as general practice:

• I provide students with an overview of each chapter.
• I guide students to focus on what I think are the most important points.
• I spend time orienting them to complicated figures.

All three of these things can be done in a video mini-lecture that students can watch before they read the text. To be clear, watching the video is not a replacement for reading the text. It’s just a way to lead them into the material.

I’ve started preparing five-minute video introductions to each of the chapters in Understanding Our Universe, Third Edition. These introductions page through the chapter, highlighting the text and figures that students should pay special attention to, because I know they will come up again. For example, I know that the cosmological principle will be referenced multiple times throughout the book. So, in the Chapter 1 video, I make students aware that they should pay special attention to that concept.

The first two videos, for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, are linked.

Let me know what you think, and if you find these resources useful! Like all of you, I’m working away in my office here, trying to anticipate the coming semester as much as possible. I suspect that “Future Stacy” will be very grateful to “Past Stacy” if I can get some things prepared now and free up some time during the semester itself.

By Stacy Palen

As I adapt to teaching online this fall, I find that the one thing I really need students to know how to do on their own is read the textbook. I’ve always assumed they knew this skill because I remember being in high school, checking out the textbook at the beginning of the year and taking it back and forth to school with me. Maybe you remember making covers out of brown paper bags to protect the books… and I remember teachers explaining some kind of note-taking method in great detail that I used for a while and then adapted to my own purposes.

But this falls in the realm of “things aren’t what they used to be.” Some schools now have classroom sets of texts that students do not take home. Some don’t use books at all but use free online materials. Some have ebooks but not hard copies. And even for students who do have traditional hard-copy texts that they can take back and forth, some of them never received instruction on how to read them.

This is interesting, because I have never taken ten minutes of class time to explain to students that reading a textbook is not like reading Harry Potter. Nor have I taken ten minutes to give them a strategy for approaching this kind of reading. It just never occurred to me. (I have given entire assignments to my upper-division classes about how to read a journal article, but that’s pretty specialized.) As I think about what I really need students to do while learning in an online environment, the textbook looms larger, rather than smaller, in my mind. Well, then. If that’s true, I guess I’d better tell them how to do it.

To this end, I made a video, about 10 minutes long, in which I explain my textbook-reading process. This is not a perfect process; it’s not the best process; and it might not be the process you use. But it’s a process that gets students thinking about textbook reading as a skill that they can learn and then adapt to their own needs.

I’m pretty pleased with how the video turned out. I made it on my iPad; I used the “Screen Recording” feature in the “Settings” to capture what I was doing in Notability. Then I edited it in iMovie and uploaded it to Kaltura. There is a little 8-second, University-specific boilerplate introduction that I asked our Marketing/Communications team to make for me so I can drop it into all of the videos I make in the future. This 10-minute video took me about 3 hours to make, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Going forward, I think I can cut that time roughly in half; I need to plan for about 10 minutes of work for each minute of finished video.

I’ll be making more of these, so let me know in the “Comments” section below if there’s a particular video topic that you need. If you need it, other people probably do, too! I’ll see what I can get done.

By Stacy Palen

No one knows what this fall semester is going to look like, and it stresses me out!

We might be back in normal face-to-face classes, but we might be back at half-capacity. Or we might be all online. Or we might start face-to-face, and then the second wave will hit, and we’ll have to go online for the rest of the semester. Or maybe we’ll just have to go online for two weeks, when there is a local outbreak. Or we might need to have replacement materials available for students so they don’t feel compelled to come to class when they are sick. Or maybe none of the above, because of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which I hear is currently scheduled for August…just kidding…I think.

In an effort to get control over the things I can control, I’ve started planning my fall courses as both face-to-face and online, in parallel. This means double the work, but given the magnitude of the uncertainties, it feels prudent.

As I have been thinking about this, and starting to organize resources and activities for students, I’ve also started to make a list of the things that are missing, and I’m figuring out how to pull them together.

Over the next few months, I’ll share what I’m doing to get prepared here on the blog. I’ll be making short videos for students about study skills, such as a “How to Read a Textbook” one, as well as other videos introducing and summarizing each chapter of the textbook. There will also be open-ended questions for LMS discussions that I can factor into students’ grades, and there will be web resources, such as “Using the Web” problems, which can also be found at the end of the textbook. And lots of other things that I haven’t thought out fully yet.

Many of us have taught online for a long time, and many of us have an online section; others, however, do not. I know that, for myself, moving four different courses (not just Introductory Astronomy) into the online environment before the end of August is…overwhelming.

I’m sure we are all feeling frazzled and overwhelmed, so let’s be frazzled and overwhelmed together! I hope you’ll share your clever ideas, resources, online or at-home activities, methods for interacting with students, and so on, in the “Comments” section below. Or drop me a line, and you can even guest-write a post about your idea!

By Stacy Palen

Sometimes, “learning by doing” requires the use of a model or a simulation. It’s not possible for students to go into space far above Earth’s North Pole, or to change the mass of a planet and see how it affects the behavior of the central star.

There are loads of simulations and animations available online. So many, in fact, that it can be bewildering to find what you need, and it can be even more complicated to troubleshoot technology to figure out why one of your students can’t access the resources while another can’t see all the buttons.

Gradually, we’ve been working to create a stable set of straightforward simulations and animations that support the Exploration activities at the end of every chapter of Understanding Our Universe and 21^st Century Astronomy. Many of these Explorations are guided inquiry experiments that use one of the interactive simulations or animations.

For example, in Chapter 12, students are guided through an investigation of the H-R Diagram using an interactive graph. When students move the cursor along the track of the evolution of a low-mass star, they can predict and then see the changes in the star. This helps them develop an intuition for the properties of stars in different regions of the H-R Diagram, and helps them learn how stars like the Sun evolve after they leave the main sequence.

Explorations using simulations or animations have pre-built assignments in SmartWork that include hints for difficult questions, and prompt students to explore the interactive graphs in more detail. It’s easy to assign these activities as a unit or as individual questions. You could also write your own questions in SmartWork or in your LMS (such as Canvas), which reference the simulations or animations that your students access through SmartWork.

I didn’t have “online teaching in a global pandemic” in mind when I created this feature. It was “just” something that I did with my classes when I had the luxury of teaching in a tech-enabled classroom. But I routinely assign Exploration activities as part of my students’ online homework. And I suspect I’ll be doing even more of this over the next few semesters!

By Stacy Palen

My favorite way to use Reading Astronomy News is to prompt classroom discussion. The articles at the end of the chapters are short enough that students can read them in less than ten minutes—if they forget to read one before class, they can read it at the beginning of class—and the questions are open-ended enough to spark engaging discussions about other topics that students have been reading about.

I find that if I have a classroom discussion once or twice near the beginning of the semester, I can sometimes regret it. Because then the rest of the semester is full of “Dr. Palen, did you read the Internet thing about the space thing that the telescope saw?” Or other similar types of questions that are, more or less, just like the first one. I almost never know what they are talking about.

At this current time, I feel that this Reading Astronomy News feature is especially important. While it may be true that (as Al Bartlett used to say) the greatest problem facing the human species is our inability to understand the exponential function, it is almost certainly true that the second greatest problem facing the human species is our inability to critically evaluate the news.

Unfortunately, classroom discussions are not what they used to be. While it’s possible to have a meeting on Zoom, a “discussion” really does require everyone to be able to see one another so they can be polite and wait for someone else to finish speaking, and so they can also see the body language that means “That was a joke!” or “I’m taking a risk by speaking up.”

In the latter half of our semester, when we were teaching online, I moved my Reading Astronomy News assignments into the online SmartWork homework system. Each article is available in SmartWork and has a pre-built assignment with a handful of questions asking students to evaluate what they’ve read given the context of the chapter material. I assigned some of these pre-built assignments during the last six weeks of class.

I don’t really know how well this worked. Certainly, students did the assignments and answered the questions. And they did a good job, too. However, it was deeply unsatisfying to me because I did not get any insights into how they were thinking about what they read. My goal with this feature and these assignments is to help students learn to read the news critically, and it’s hard for me to know how well they’re doing this without talking to them. It was beyond me, in the chaos of the transition, to craft questions that asked students to connect what they were reading to what was happening in the world.

Over these next few weeks, I’ll be thinking about how to get the same benefits of a face-to-face discussion without having to meet individually with small groups of students over video conference. Certainly, there are technological capabilities (break-out “rooms” in Zoom, for example) that I don’t fully comprehend yet. I’ll need to find some fellow faculty members or former students to be my “guinea pigs” while I figure out how well this works…

By Stacy Palen

If you are reading this blog, you are probably already a fan of Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy. Often, the best way for students to learn is by doing it themselves. At this particular time, when we have all been asked to move our classrooms home, perhaps for more than just the end of the semester, it may be difficult to see how to make Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy possible for students.

This is a perfect time to investigate the chapter-opening figures in the third (or fourth) edition of Understanding Our Universe. The first two pages of each chapter feature an activity that students can do at home with items they have around the house. While I did not have a global pandemic in mind when I wrote these activities, I sure am glad to have them now. I wasn’t thinking that students would not be able to acquire additional tools…I just thought that they were more likely to actually do the activities if they didn’t have to go to the store first.

Half of these activities are observing assignments, such as observing the night sky with the aid of a star chart found in the appendices at the back of the book. It occurs to me that students might enjoy being reminded of these star charts as something nice for them to use in the evenings!

The other half of these activities are experiments or models. For example, students can explore the expanding universe using rubber bands and paper clips, and they can learn about thermal equilibrium using a couple of ice cubes and a few glasses.

All of the activities ask students to make a prediction, carry out the activity, and evaluate their results. Many of the activities lend themselves to photograph submissions in an LMS, like Canvas. A question or two in an LMS quiz or SmartWork homework assignment can confirm whether students have done the activity, and whether they can relate these activities to the chapter material.

For example, one of my favorite activities is the melting-ice-cubes activity from Chapter 17. It very clearly demonstrates that it’s easier for spaces in direct contact to come to thermal equilibrium. Connecting this experiment to the horizon problem requires students to think a little bit about what it means for different regions of the universe to be “connected” or “separated.” Asking them to take a picture of the cups and mark the hot and cold areas makes the cosmic microwave background more concrete, and it creates something swiftly grade-able that ensures that students have done the assignment!

As I plan for online teaching through the summer, and possibly into the fall, I’m working these activities into my course plan more formally than I have in the past. I’m also devising new ones to include throughout 21^st Century Astronomy. I’ll be test-driving them over the next year or so. Let me know if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see!