GEOL 2391 Environmental Geology

Welcome to GEOL 2391: Environmental Geology.

This Course Guide contains important information about the course structure, learning materials, and expectations for completing the course requirements. It also provides information about how and when to contact your Open Learning Faculty Member, an expert in the course content, who will guide you through the course. Take some time to read through the Course Guide to familiarize yourself with what you need to do to successfully complete your course.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your Open Learning Faculty Member. We hope you enjoy the course!

Course Description

Students examine geological processes and material and their interaction with human activities, environmental planning, and management.

In this course, you will examine how geological processes affect the environment as well as humans and their infrastructure, and how humans affect geological processes. This is a geology course, and it is recommended that you have some geological knowledge before attempting the course. It would be helpful if you have completed an introductory course on geology (first-year college), but if you haven’t, there is some recommended reading that you should do at the start.

Prerequisites

Provincial Grade 12 diploma or equivalent is assumed.

Learning Outcomes

After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

1. Describe how natural geologic processes, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and slope failures, create
   conditions impacting human infrastructure and activities.
2. Explain how human activity, including human-caused climate change, impacts natural geological systems and the
   natural geo-environmental setting on local, regional and global scales.
3. Describe how the impact of these natural and human-induced processes-human suffering, property damage and
   economic disruption-can be mitigated by proper consideration of geologic factors in planning.

Course Materials

This section describes the course materials that you will need for GEOL 2391: Environmental Geology.

Required Textbooks

The following free, open educational resource is required for this course:

• Earle, S. (2021).  Environmental Geology (3rd Cdn ed.). Thompson Rivers University. https://environmental-geology-dev.pressbooks.tru.ca/

Depending on your preferences, you can access both the course units and the textbook on-line from a computer or a portable device, you can download chapters as pdfs and store them on your device, or you can make your own printed copies from the pdfs. Your institution may also be able to provide you with printed copies of the text and course units. You are encouraged to read the course units from paper, if that what works best for you, but, if you do, you’ll need to come back to the on-line document from time to time to take advantage of the embedded features and links.

Note: If you have questions about course textbooks or other materials, email OLMaterials.

Additional Resources

Each unit has other required resources, such as videos; these are specified separately in each unit. Transcriptions will be available for any required videos that are identified as necessary to achieve the course learning outcomes.

Lab Kit

You should receive a small lab kit of clay mineral samples to complete Assignment 2, in Unit 2.

Required Hardware, Software, Computer Skills, and Other Resources

Technical Basics lists the hardware, software, and computer skills requirements for your course.

Course Units

GEOL 2391: Environmental Geology is divided into 5 units. The outlines—or lesson plans—for the units are in this document, each with an overview of the course content, links to extra resources, and assigned readings from the Environmental Geology on-line textbook (https://environmental-geology-dev.pressbooks.tru.ca/). 

If you are taking this course for credit, each unit also has an associated assignment. You can start working on the assignment as you are going through each unit, the text readings, exercises and chapter-end questions, or you can wait until you are finished the readings and other activities.

Assessments

To successfully complete this course, you must achieve a passing grade of 50% or higher on the overall course and 50% or higher on the mandatory Final Exam. The following table shows how your final grade will be determined for this course.

Assignments (60%)

Each unit has an associated assignment, and each is worth 12% of the final mark. It is strongly recommended that you submit each assignment for marking as soon as you have completed it. That way you can benefit from your instructor’s feedback while working on subsequent assignments.

Final Examination (40%)

In-person final examinations for Open Learning courses are now available on a limited basis.

Please note that virtual examinations will continue to be offered, whenever possible. We have heard overwhelmingly from students that they wish to maintain the flexibility and convenience of writing exams at home in a virtual setting.

Our intention is to provide the choice of in-person examinations for students for whom it may not be feasible or desirable to take advantage of the online proctoring option. The in-person options will still require students to take the exam at an approved testing centre or location. Students will be responsible for any fees charged by testing centres or locations. The TRU list of approved exam centres or locations will be updated shortly.

Currently, most Open Learning courses have a virtual final exam that can be taken from home via ProctorU at any time that is convenient.  If your course has a “final exam” tab, please refer to that for information about how to apply.

If your course currently does not have a virtual final exam (and does not have a final project instead), there will be an alternative assessment available to you. These will be phased out as we develop new exams that, in most cases, will allow for virtual and in-person options.

To apply for this alternate assessment, complete all the required coursework. Then, email exams@tru.ca by the 12th of the month in the month you plan to write the exam. For example, to apply to write your exam in March, send an email with the subject line “March Exams” by March 12th.

We will continue to post updates here as they become available.

If you have any questions in general, please email exams@tru.ca.

Grading Scale

The official grading scales for all Open Learning courses are noted in TRU’s Grading Systems and Procedures.

Your assignments should be independently developed and should reflect your best efforts. The grade that is assigned to your assignment work will be based upon evidence that you have:

• Addressed the questions or assignment posed.
• Developed responses that are clear and well-reasoned.
• Demonstrated clear understanding and application of course material.
• Met university-level expectations for written communication, including logical organization and correct sentence structure, grammar, and spelling.
• Submitted original work, with citations and references for any sources that you use.

Assignments can only be submitted once (unless there are formatting issues), so make sure your submission is your best work. Please refer to the specific grading rubric that accompanies each assignment for more information on grading criteria.

Academic Integrity

Appropriate academic conduct requires that you complete your [assignments / assessments] independently, honestly, and without misrepresentation or plagiarism. Typically, plagiarism occurs in three forms: when a writer uses someone’s exact words or ideas as if they were her/his own, paraphrases someone’s ideas without acknowledgement or identifying the source, or simply does not include the proper citations.

Be sure to cite all sources of direct quotations and borrowed ideas. If you do not, you could fail your assignments and, potentially, the course.

Each assessment is viewed individually for academic integrity. Please be aware, should you choose to submit multiple [assignments / assessments] at the same time and if an academic integrity violation is discovered in more than one of those assignments, that each assignment submission will be viewed as a separate offence and sanctions will be applied accordingly.

Note: Citing facts, statistics, or other illustrative materials deemed to be common knowledge is not considered to be plagiarism.

It is your responsibility to ensure that you are fully familiar with the “Forms of Academic Dishonesty” section of the TRU Student Academic Integrity Policy.

TRU Library also provides the valuable Plagiarism: What It Is and How to Avoid It resource.

Be sure to cite the sources you use in assessments and discussions. Check with your Open Learning Faculty Member to see which style to use. TRU Library’s Citation Style Guides is an excellent resource for writing academic citations.

Suggested Course Schedule

The course is designed to be completed by independent study, but could also be offered in a classroom setting.

You have 30 weeks to complete this course. The following schedule indicates how you can complete your course in 16-17 weeks, the time normally available for a traditional semester-long university class.

You may benefit from filling-in your intended completion dates and printing this schedule to post around your home or workplace. If you plan to take longer than 17 weeks to complete your course, it is a good idea to plan for the work in the time you have, using this suggested schedule as a guide.

If you are working on your own, you should expect to spend at least about 60 hours reading and doing exercises, and another 15 hours completing assignments. You should decide how long you want to take to complete the course, and then use about 1/6th of that time for each of the 5 assignments, and the last 1/6th to prepare for the exam. For example, if you want to be finished four months (17 weeks) from now, you should aim to complete an assignment about every three weeks, as outlined in the template below. You can adjust this as you see fit, and then write actual dates into the 3rd row.

A note on figure and table numbering: These course units include references to figures and tables in the open textbook (Environmental Geology), and also to figures and tables in this document. The textbook references are always of the form “Figure 1.2.1” where the first number refers to the chapter in the textbook, the second to the section of that chapter, and the third to the figure number in that section. The Course Units references are of the form Figure 1-1, where the first number is the unit number, and the second is the figure number in that unit. Sections, figures and tables in the text all have “dot” separators. Sections, figures and tables in this document all have “dash” separators.

Media Attribution

• Figure 0-1 Photograph by Steven Earle, CC BY 4.0