The undergraduate program at the University of Texas has grown into the largest astronomy teaching program in the world, with some 7000 students per year (almost 20,000 credit hours). The department has 22.5 Ph.D.-level teaching faculty, about 45 graduate students, and about 40 pre-professional undergraduate majors. But most of the enrollment is in courses that satisfy the science requirements of students in liberal arts and non-technical majors. In 1985–86, 96.4 per cent of our undergraduate credit hours taught were in such classes. It is instructive to examine the historical reasons for our growth and its educational consequences, and to draw some conclusions from both for other programs.

As interest in astronomy develops through missions to Mars, SETI, and heaven-only-knows-what earth-shaking new discoveries in the future, demand for astronomy courses at all levels will increase. Without adequate numbers of professional astronomers to teach them, persons from other fields will be thrown into the breech. Already a significant number of college students in the United States are receiving instruction from persons not trained in astronomy. I suspect that this is currently true world-wide, especially as physicists who adopt our field for their research on neutrinos or cosmic strings are assigned or volunteer to teach elementary courses.

Although few people enjoy tests and examinations, these aspects of education appear to be essential to the maintenance of standards, and they provide a vital learning environment for both students and instructor. Opinions regarding “objective,” or “multiple-choice,” questions range from very positive, which is my own qualified opinion, to very negative. In the latter instance, some claim that such questions should never be used, and refer derisively to multiple-choice questions as “multiple-guess questions.”

Dreary correspondence colleges that send tatty typewritten notes to their suffering students are gradually being eclipsed by full-fledged open-learning institutions of wide educational significance. The Open University is the premier open-learning institution in the U.K., perhaps even in the world. It already offers an astronomy course as a significant part of a science major degree, and further courses are planned, including an in-service course for school teachers.

In this article I discuss:

1. 1. open learning systems, including the ways in which various educational media can be used to good effect

2. 2. some features of the existing astronomy course of The Open University, and some possibilities for future courses.

I will be describing a self-paced mastery-oriented introductory astronomy course that has been offered at the University of South Carolina since 1972. This course is a three-semester sequence with total enrollments of 800–1000 students per term. Most of the enrollment is for the first semester of the sequence. Although these particular courses are designed for non-science majors, I believe that the methods developed in these courses can be applied to courses for astronomy majors. These methods could provide a solution to the problems of teaching classes and, at the same time, traveling for research and meetings.

A mastery-oriented course involves developing a list of learning objectives that are described in terms of performance of given tasks. That is, words such as understand and appreciate should not be used. Performance objectives involve words such as recognize, calculate, measure, and describe. Any set of learning objectives must be tied to a set or readings, a textbook, and/or supplementary notes. These items are chosen or written by the instructor(s) to provide the background necessary for the students to master the objectives.

As do most universities in the United States, the University of New Mexico (UNM) offers a one-semester introductory course in astronomy aimed at the vast audience of non-science majors. UNM is a non-selective, minimally-funded state research university with an undergraduate enrollment of about 20,000 students — with a median age of 26. Many of the students have jobs and families and attend on a part-time basis. The Physics and Astronomy Department usually offers three sections of Astronomy 101 to accommodate students’ schedules: in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Total enrollments per semester range between 400 to 600; the course is also regularly taught during the summer. The class has no prerequisites of any kind, is advertised as “non-mathematical,” and does not have a required lab for observations. (A related lab course, Astronomy 111, is available, and is taken by about 100 students per semester.) The course attempts to cover “all” of astronomy with a special emphasis on the theme of cosmic evolution. Instructors tend to use visual aids (slides, videos, films, laser disks, and microcomputers) heavily. Students usually rate the instructors and the course in the top 10 to 30% of all instructors who choose to use a university-wide class evaluation instrument, compared to a group of other lower-division courses.

Every year in the United States, many thousands of university and college students take a one-semester course in astronomy as part of a “Liberal Arts” curriculum. At many institutions these courses are the raison d’etre for the astronomy program, and at most other institutions they are viewed as an important term in calculating an astronomy department’s contribution.

I have often had a sense that what we are doing in these courses is counter-productive to any serious understanding of the goals of liberal arts curriculum. Over the last six or seven years, as I have been participating in my college’s efforts to introduce a year-long, interdisciplinary survey of the humanities into our curriculum, this hunch has been confirmed: in our efforts to fit astronomy into the liberal-arts curriculum, we have ironically been undermining the enterprise.

Astronomy has greatly progressed in this decade. The number of people who are interested in astronomical phenomena is certainly increasing as the number of IAU members increases. These people are divided into several categories, depending on their degrees of interests. For Japan, these are as follows:

The situation is changed when some such special event, such as a return of Halley’s comet, occurs. We can say that our present target in teaching astronomy is to increase the number of people in each category except the last one.

At first sight, there may appear to be a very wide range of project situations that are in use. Students may seem to be doing the equivalent of postgraduate work, or may seem to be working on contract basis, or may even seem to be doing rather long term laboratory exercises, or some mixture of all three. However, there are in essence two major types of project situations — the free-scope project and the set-piece project.

The free-scope project attaches importance to the selection of project topics by the student. The student may be told to select a problem from the entire spectrum of problems offered by the science of astronomy, and to get on with it, or there may be guidelines to restrict the choice. Nevertheless, the choice of topic is the prerogative of the student, and it is believed that the effort of making that choice is important in the teaching/learning process. Because of the range of formats for free-scope projects, it is a convenient form to adapt to meet varying local circumstances.

The Maria Mitchell Observatory monitors variable stars photographically and has lately begun to receive photometric data remotely. The staff consists solely of the director and undergraduate student assistants during summer and January vacations. Research topics are chosen for both their scientific interest and their educational potential.

The scientific goal is to improve variable-star statistics by answering any unresolved observational questions. Lately the emphasis is on pulsators in the Cepheid instability strip. Can we watch the stars grow older? We look for deviations from a single, constant period.

In this paper we describe our experiences with film copies of original astronomical photographs taken with the 1.2-meter U.K. Schmidt Telescope (UKST) in Australia, and used as teaching material in the Department of Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh. Two packages are intended for undergraduate use; the Education Packages are designed as visual aids for colleges, schools, and amateur groups.

The original purpose of the telescope (which was commissioned in 1973) was to carry out a Southern Sky Survey to match the Northern Survey done by the Palomar 48” Schmidt Telescope. The telescope has a very wide field — 6.5 × 6.5 degrees, or equivalent to over a hundred and fifty full moons, and the photographs reach objects of 23rd magnitude: they record stars like the Sun to the very edges of the Galaxy and galaxies to a thousand million light years. Each photograph has an area of 356 × 356 mm and records between 100,000 and 1 million stars and galaxies. The survey photographs are the deepest available maps of the sky and are indispensable tools for astronomers in searches for unusual objects, for investigation of the distribution of galaxies and many other tasks. The UKST is equipped with objective prisms that are capable of producing low dispersion spectra of stars and galaxies. A prism of very small angle is placed in front of the aperture of the telescope so that each individual image is drawn out into a tiny spectrum on the photograph. The dispersion is very small, only a few millimeters from the red to the ultraviolet, but the dominant features in the spectra are recognizable and have many applications.

The objectives of this exercise are to gain familiarity with the appearance of the spectra of stars, to understand some of the temperature and luminosity criteria used to classify spectra, and to gain insights into the relationship between the appearance of stellar spectra and physical conditions in stellar atmospheres.

An astronomy class typically is composed of twenty or more students, one instructor, and one telescope. For observing sessions, these numbers mean that at any one moment most of the students are standing, slowly freezing in the dark, waiting their turn at the eyepiece. Moreover, when they do have their 20-second peek, moist breath, a bump by the last observer, or unfamiliarity with the instrument often mean that the object will look hazy, be out of focus, or even be out of view. A couple of sessions under these circumstances can dampen the interest even of keen students. Also, the instructor may be reluctant to let individual students have unsupervised access to the one, expensive, fragile telescope.

Our university recently purchased a liquid-nitrogen-cooled CCD camera system (from Photometrics Ltd., Tucson, Arizona) which has been installed on our campus’ 40-cm multiple access (Cassegrain/Newtonian) telescope. Images are reduced online at the observatory using Photometrics’ microcomputer-based analysis software package, which includes operations for standard data acquisition and initial stages of data reduction — including corrections for bias, dark current, and flat fielding. Images are displayed on a 256-level-gray-scale black and white monitor. Additional post-processing can be done either on the CCD system’s computer at the observatory or on IBM-AT/PC’s located both at the observatory and in the laboratory.

Introductory astronomy lab exercises have traditionally been rather simple in nature — observations are often limited to visual observing, sketching, and perhaps photography. These types of labs are more like 19th-century astronomy than the techniques used by modern astronomers. Students should also be introduced to quantitative work in astronomy, in the same way that they are in equivalent introductory physics and chemistry labs. A typical solution to some of these problems has been to use published data (for example, the Sky & Telescope lab exercise series) to provide numerical work. This is less satisfactory for the student than obtaining his or her own quantitative data to reduce and analyze.

The SEMS Project (Science Education in Middle School) in Michigan is a cooperative science education improvement effort by several universities, hundreds of school districts, and the state department of education. Upper elementary and middle/junior high school teachers have been targeted for improvement of science instruction. Although the initial area of focus included teachers of grades five through nine, the project has been successfully extended to early elementary grades. While there are many excellent teachers at these grade levels, research findings indicate that 49 per cent of all middle school science teachers are teaching without a major or minor in science! The situation is even more critical at the upper elementary levels.

Astronomy is one of the most popular of the sciences. That this is so can be seen in the frequent news articles about astronomical discoveries and happenings, in the number of questions about the sky fielded by planetarium and observatory staff, and in the large turnouts for public observing sessions at observatories or astronomy club star parties.

Another reflection of astronomy’s popularity is the fact that thousands of university students study the subject each year. Only a few of these are training to become professional astronomers. The vast majority of these students seek mainly to obtain a general background. An important subset of the latter group are those students preparing to teach in the schools and who have the need to understand, and be able to explain, common astronomical phenomena clearly. Those of us who teach introductory astronomy courses have an obligation to ensure that these prospective teachers are well trained.

Since antiquity, doing astronomy means basically stepping outside, looking upward, and considering the widest environment. Thus any undergraduate astronomy program, no matter how diverse its course offering, is incomplete without observational astronomy. For example, some California community colleges offer several courses including such titles as “Man and the Cosmos,” “Final Stellar States,” “Astronomy Enrichment,” and “Astronomical Myths, Mysteries & Fallacies,” but do not offer “Observational Astronomy.” As a teaching astronomer, I question the wisdom and honesty of such practice of proliferation solely based on sensationalism. An introductory lecture course and an observational lab course must be the core of lower-division undergraduate astronomy education. Anything else, in my opinion, is peripheral.

There are many ways to use computers in teaching. This paper discusses one of those ways: as an adjunct to the introductory astronomy course as taught in the United States.

The computer allows the demonstration of phenomena in a graphic dynamic manner, so its use can enable students to gain a deeper understanding of the material than they might when they passively listen to a lecture, look at slides, or study a textbook. In a very real sense, material presented in a computer is similar to that presented by film or video, but with one major difference: viewing movies is essentially a passive experience while interacting with a computer is an active one. Using computer simulations, the user can vary initial conditions and observe the effect of changes. This ability is the case whether the person doing the interacting is the instructor during a lecture or the student during a lab or while independently executing a homework exercise.

The two interactive software packages, which we called ASTRONOMIA 1 and ASTRONOMIA 2 (in the following Al and A2) and developed for a personal computer under MS-DOS, are primarily intended to be used in junior-high and high schools as tools for teaching astronomy. With the help of these programs and using the sky as a laboratory, the teacher can explain the most difficult parts of the astronomical geography: time and coordinates. Very few schools in Italy own the necessary educational tools such as a small planetarium, a sidereal clock, an oriented celestial sphere, etc.

We tried to exploit the capability of a personal computer to visualize and to present the results of a calculation as diagrams and tables. A limited interaction permitted by the programs allows the user to compare the results with other computations.