Handbook

No formal background in Astronomy or Astrophysics is required.

For this unit, we are implementing a learner-oriented approach, where our responsibility is to find the ways to help our students to learn the material in an efficient way, and students’ responsibility is to actively engage in their own learning process. Our main goals for this unit are for our students to understand the nature of science through the eyes of astrobiology, understand the big ideas in the field and develop a lifelong interest in scientific explorations. We have designed a careful sequence of online learning material, enriched with interactive applets, quizzes, and videos, that are followed by asynchronous online learning tasks to meet these goals. The assessment is structured to help you monitor your learning and to help us support you where needed. All the online material is available on Moodle and most of the activities are delivered online. Additional on-campus observing sessions are designed to support your engagement and enrich learning experience in this unit. Practical activities include a mix of guided inquery-based activities and hands-on activities that can be completed on your own, to help you explore some of the concepts in more depth.

• Applies to all offerings

• Applies to all offerings

The workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours spread across the semester (roughly 12 hours per week) - approximately a mixture of attendance at scheduled activities and self-scheduled study time. Learning activities comprise a mixture of instructor directed, peer directed and self-directed learning, which includes face-to-face and online engagement.

We provide digital lecture notes for this unit. Having a basic (ie, non-programable) scientific calculator is also highly recommended.

Astrobiology encompasses wide range of topics in science. We comprised a list of interesting resources (videos, digital text, etc) covering various topics of the unit available on Moodle.