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For the second year in a row, Michigan Tech will offer a unique graduate class for volcanology graduate students.  The class will also be taken by graduate students in six universities from North America, including McGill and Simon Fraser in Canada, Universidad de Colima and UNAM in Mexico and the University at Buffalo.

Advanced graduate classes are meant to prepare students for proposal writing and help students to design advanced research. Advanced graduate classes are difficult for universities to offer with regularity. They require up to the minute knowledge of highly specialized subjects and this is a difficult challenge for faculties which must struggle to keep track of all advanced topics.

Seminar series are one way to address the need for currency, but these are costly and demand that experts be available for travel. Another problem is that specialized topics are only of interest to a small number of students on any one campus.  Because of these difficulties specialized classes are expensive to arrange.  Another issue is that on any one campus such specialized advanced classes rarely attract enough students to make them economical.

A new way to manage currency and economics of such offerings is to use conferencing software which allows many campuses to offer classes together and also to use many experts as contributors without having to pay for travel costs.  The current class pools the needs of six universities and uses the services of 14 experts from around the world.  Instead of a single campus enrollment of 5-7, the class will have about 50 graduate students from six campuses, and the travel costs are nil. The class supplies lecture and reading materials through the internet and the students study these materials and interact to discuss them via internet conferencing software.  Then the expert of the week joins the class for a 90 minute discussion session where the students can ask questions of the expert. 

This year’s class is about Volcano Instability, and addresses the possibility of catastrophic collapse of volcanoes, a important research focus for volcanologists. Last year’s class on Supereruptions has been a springboard toward an improved effort this year.  We have added a “pre-discussion” online among the different university students, where initial questions and discussion will occur before the expert is online.  This allows for focusing on the most interesting and unique questions when the expert joins the group.

Software used by the class is Marratech, a conferencing software that employs a whiteboard.  Support by ETS at Michigan Tech is vital. This innovative class is funded by the EHaz consortium through the FIPSE North American Mobility project of the US Department of Education.

The website for EHaz is www.geo.mtu.edu/EHaz and the class coordinator is Bill Rose (Geological Engineering & Sciences).