Geomorphology: Syllabus, Winter Term 2015 · 2014-06-03 · GEOG 3102: Geomorphology Syllabus |...

GEOG 3102: Geomorphology Syllabus | Winter Term 2015

Carleton University, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies /8

Geomorphology: Syllabus, Winter Term 2015

Draft version (June 2, 2014).

Notes on this draft outline for 2015 This syllabus and the schedule table in the end will provide an overview of what will be covered in this course, although details will still change a bit. A few important points:

• The course is based on a combination of (a) reading and homework assignments to take up and understand basic concepts and information at an individual pace, (b) lectures to deepen and broaden understanding and to explain individual important concepts, (c) lab exercises to translate theoretical knowledge into practical application and to gain expe-rience with the relevant methods and techniques as well as the difficulties associated with them.

• The labs will in part use simple scripting/programming (R) and GIS (ArcGIS). Students without prior experience with these tools can take the course and can do very well, but should anticipate having to spend some extra time in building the necessary skills.

• There are many graded small activities in this course and constant participation pays. Since the labs and some of the reading assignments are graded, the midterm and the fi-nal exam focus on how well students can reflect on, integrate, and apply their learning. The exams will take the form of short essays in order to assess student’s ability to argue precisely and concisely. This form of essay will be practiced in one of the lab exercises and after the midterm, detailed feedback for improvement will be given.

Administrative details Instructor: Stephan Gruber

Office: Room B443A Loeb Building Hours: Wednesdays 14:00–15:00 (during winter term) Email: [email protected] Phone: (613) 520-2600 extension 2562

Assistant: TBA

Prerequisites: GEOG 2104 (The Earth’s Surface) and third-year standing, or permission of the department.

Lectures: Monday 12:35–13:25 Wednesday 12:35–13:25

Lab exercises: Thursday 14:35–16:25



cuLearn: This course in on cuLearn as GEOG3102A WINTER 2014. To access your courses on cuLearn go to http://carleton.ca/culearn. For support, go to http://carleton.ca/students. Any unresolved questions can be directed to Computing and Communication Services (CCS) by phone at 613-520-3700 or via email at [email protected]. Communication policy: Private correspondence with the instructor and teaching assistant must be through a Carleton email account (this is accessible in cuLearn); requests from other addresses will not be answered. If you have questions of a general nature, please post it to the Ask the instructor and TA forum. Use the Search Forums button in the top right when you are in this forum in order to see if an earlier post on your topic exists. We will try to answer your questions in the forum or by email as fast as possible and usually you can expect a reply within 48 hours. Information on cuLearn or sent via email will be considered to have been provided to all students within 24 hours of posting and students will be fully responsible for reading and re-sponding appropriately to this.

Conduct: Please be considerate of your fellow students and undertake not to disturb their learning. You are welcome to sleep or daydream in class or to not attend at all as this does not disturb anyone. If you do come, please make an effort to be on time for the beginning of class and stay until the end. Please avoid the use of computers or smartphones as this distracts oth-ers around you.

Acknowledgement: This lecture has been modified based on material from a previous course that was kindly provided by Dr. Jon Tunnicliffe.

Learning outcomes and course contents The following learning outcomes summarize the overarching expectations of student’s abilities at the end of this course. These expectations contribute to the larger-scale objectives defined at the program level for the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.

To pass this course, you must demonstrate the ability to:

(a) apply key concepts, theories, and methods in geomorphology to a given problem;

(b) discuss the limitations of your work or that of others;

(c) create, apply and evaluate computer-aided tools to solve simple problems;

(d) communicate in a concise, accurate, traceable, and effective manner; and

(e) discuss transversal concepts such as “scale” or “emergence” in a context broader than geomorphology.

To build and train the required skills, this course presents a survey of applied and theoretical concepts in geomorphology. We will look at emerging ideas, tools and techniques in hillslope, fluvial, and glacial surface processes and landforms. Laboratories will focus on the develop-ment of practical, quantitative skills in data collection, mapping, and modelling for the purposes of land-use planning and development, watershed management, environmental impact and risk/hazard assessment, and reconstructing landscape history. Conceptual and numerical models are explored and developed in order to synthesize learning in topics such as hillslope stability, river dynamics and catchment sediment budgets. Weekly lectures will be enhanced with relevant readings that cover recent trends and discoveries as well as “classic gems” in ge-omorphology.



Materials Online resources: This course has a strong online component on cuLearn. Slides and lab in-structions will be available on cuLearn and it is the students’ responsibility to monitor cuLearn for new content and information. Usually, slides will be available at 8:00 on the day of the lec-ture or lab. There are a number of graded interactions required each week. Please make sure you understand what they are and when they are due.

Reading: We will use a mixture of various book chapters and articles. Reading is usually as-signed in a Wednesday lecture where a short motivation is given. From that moment on you can find on cuLearn: (a) a link to the material to read, (b) a rationale why we read it, and (c) a number of concrete reading tasks. There will be a short quiz (called Just-in-time teaching re-sponse) to complete on these reading tasks, usually on Monday morning. This will help you re-visit the reading you have done and it helps us to structure the lecture in a good way, address-ing key issues that are not understood and building on what is understood. Make sure you develop a sound strategy for organising your reading, your notes, and your learning. This can be paper based or by using a tool such as Mendeley (www.mendeley.com). If you need help, please contact the Student Academic Success Centre http://carleton.ca/sasc/. We will not use a specific textbook, but it may help you to sometimes consult the book you used in GEOG 2104 (The Earth’s Surface): Trenhaile, A.S. 2013. Geomorphology: A Canadian Perspective. Fifth Edition. Oxford University Press: Don Mills. 575 pp. (or any older edition).

Evaluation of students Final grade: All evaluated work is graded on a scale of 0–100 points. Points in the three cate-gories of (a) lab assignments, (b) weekly learning responses, and (c) just-in-time teaching re-sponses are each averaged to yield again a range of 0–100 points per week. For aggregation over the term, these are then averaged only the best nine results in each category are counted. This means, you can miss one week and still obtain full marks. In practice, however, you should rather do all exercises and use the mechanism of dropping the worst in each category in your favour. The final grade is determined by weighting:

Final exam 25% Midterm exam 15% Lab assignments 40% (based on the nine best results) Weekly learning response 10% (based on the nine best results) Just-in-time teaching response 10% (based on the nine best results) Total 100%

The course instructor subject to the approval of the Faculty Dean determines standing in a course. This means that grades submitted by the instructor may be subject to revision. No grades are final until they have been approved by the Dean.

Final exam: The final exam will take place in the final exam period April 11–26, 2014 and the precise date will be announced during the term. It will consist of several short-answer questions and one or more essay questions, and have a maximum duration of three hours. Students are allowed to use a one-page (letter size) cheat sheet that they can prepare individually or as a group effort. A list of sample essay questions will be made available by March 24 from which



the exam questions will be drawn in identical or slightly modified form. Missing the final exam: You must contact the Registrar’s Office (not the instructor or TA) within 5 working days.

Midterm exam: The midterm exam will consist of several short-answer questions and one or more essay questions. Students are allowed to use a one-page (letter size) cheat sheet that they can prepare individually or as a group effort. A list of sample essay questions will be made available by February 3 from which the exam questions will be drawn in identical or slightly modified form. Missing the midterm exam: (1) If you miss the midterm exam due to serious illness or a death in the family, you must first obtain documentation. Examples of reasons that will NOT be considered for an exam deferral include, for example, being stressed or having too many exams in the same week. Any other reason for missing an exam or a lack of proper doc-umentation will warrant a mark of 0 on that exam. (2) Once you realize you’ll be missing the midterm, you need to contact Stephan Gruber within 48 h of the exam. Please indicate whether you are a student registered with the PMC. (3) A deferred exam will be organized. Please note that it is University policy that we are no longer accepting sick notes from Appletree Walk-in clinic. Lab assignments: For each topic/week, except for ‘Open-channel flow’, there will be one as-signment due the following Wednesday at 16:00. Please feel free to collaborate with others dur-ing the lab sessions to obtain common data and discuss open issues, but please submit your own individually-written lab reports that contain your own analyses and answers to questions. Discussions (in the lab sessions, on cuLearn or otherwise) are for gaining guidance and clarity on a topic. Students sharing/posting answers would be in breach of the Academic Integrity Pol-icy (see below). Lab assignments must be typed and are collected through cuLearn. Each as-signment has a rubric for grading that you can view on cuLearn to get an idea of what is re-quired.

Weekly learning response (WLR): This is a fast cuLearn survey of what you learned, what you liked, and what remained unclear during this week/topic. It opens Thursday at noon and is due by Friday 19:00. It helps you to recapitulate your learning and any missing links that may re-main. It helps the instructor and TA to address early key issues that may hinder further progres-sion in the course. The grading is simple: Each of the three answers obtains 100/3 points if pro-vided. Answers that show no effort for reflection of learning will of course not be counted; proper grammar and spelling are appreciated but not evaluated.

Just-in-time teaching response (JITTR): This is a weekly, fast cuLearn quiz of what you have learned from the preparation or reading assigned prior to the first lecture on a new topic. It opens Thursday at noon and is due Monday at 9:00. Based on your responses, the lecture will revisit important concepts that have remained unclear or build upon what you have learned with more exciting content. The grading is simple: No answer to a question receives 0 points and an answer receives 100 points. Results for several questions are averaged. Answers that show no effort for reflection of learning will of course not be counted. Proper grammar and spelling are appreciated but not evaluated.

Missing assignments or responses: There will be eleven weeks for which there are weekly learning responses and just-in-time-teaching responses, and ten weeks with lab assignments. Only the best ten of each (nine for lab assignments) of these will be considered towards the fi-nal grade. If you miss more than one week due to serious illness or a death in the family, you must first obtain documentation. Examples of reasons that will NOT be considered for an alter-native assignment/grading include, for example, being stressed or having too many duties in the same week. Lack of proper documentation will warrant a mark of 0 on that assignment.



Once you realize you’ll be missing more than one week, you need to contact Stephan Gruber. Please indicate whether you are a student registered with the PMC.

Penalty for late submission: Lab assignments have to be submitted before the due date/time indicated. Late submission will result in a reduction of the score by 20 points per started 24 hours of delay. The weekly learning response and just-in-time teaching response have a sharp deadline and late submission is impossible.

Technical problems: It is your responsibility to submit assignments on time. For instance, if your Internet connection may be unstable, make sure that you have either an alternative plan or enough reserve time. If you cannot submit your material because of a technical problem caused by the instructor or Carleton University, please make a printout of the screen documenting that problem and note the date/time to avoid a late penalty. Feedback: Both WLR and JITTR are intended to provide feedback to the instructor in an effi-cient way. Answers that show a sufficient refection of the lecture or reading content will receive full marks. The instructor and TA cannot provide detailed written feedback on every response. Important misunderstandings will be picked up in class or commented in cuLearn, but please be aware that writing something in the WLR or JITTR and not having it corrected DOES NOT imply that it would be entirely correct exact as you wrote it.

Appealing your grade: There may be a number of circumstances in which students will have questions regarding their grades. These questions may be about understanding the grading scheme; about the grade awarded for a specific piece of work, including work that has not been returned; or, about the determination of the final grade. Wherever possible, both during the term and after, concerns about the grading of student work should be settled informally be-tween the student and the instructor. When appealing your grade, please familiarize yourself with sections 2.7 and 2.8 of http://calendar.carleton.ca/undergrad/regulations/, from where also the paragraph above was taken, before beginning and appeal process. To make sure your case can be considered fairly, both for you and your fellow students, please provide the instructor with a short (one page maximum) summary of what point(s) you would like to have revisited and why you believe you deserve more points that you have received. Based on this, a personal meeting will be scheduled aimed at finding a resolution in agreement.

Evaluation of instructors and course This course will be officially evaluated with a paper-based form near the end of the term. This evaluation is important (a) for the instructor to improve the course, and (b) provides a feedback to Carleton University for helping to assess the quality of teaching delivered by the instructor. Additionally, there will be an informal mid-term evaluation to get students’ feedback for im-proving the course while it is still ongoing, and an informal final survey to help improve the course. Please take the time to complete these evaluations as accurately and as constructively as you can. By doing so, you help us improve how we teach you and future students.

General feedback If you have any pressing issue requiring an improvement in the course, especially with respect to accessibility, please contact us any time. If you notice spelling mistakes or things that can be improved in any of the materials we use, please let me (Stephan) know so I can fix it and make the course better for next year.



Academic regulations

The following section reviews the most important academic regulations at Carleton University. Please refer to the official version of the Academic Regulations of the University at http://calendar.carleton.ca/undergrad/regulations/ if you require further information. The official document takes precedence over this syllabus.

Instructional Offences The University Senate defines plagiarism as “presenting, whether intentional or not, the ideas, expression of ideas or work of others as one’s own.” This can include:

• reproducing or paraphrasing portions of someone else’s published or unpublished material, regardless of the source, and presenting these as one’s own without proper citation or ref-erence to the original source;

• submitting a take-home examination, essay, laboratory report or other assignment written, in whole or in part, by someone else;

• using ideas or direct, verbatim quotations, or paraphrased material, concepts, or ideas without appropriate acknowledgment in any academic assignment;

• using another’s data or research findings;

• failing to acknowledge sources through the use of proper citations when using another’s works and/or failing to use quotation marks;

• handing in "substantially the same piece of work for academic credit more than once with-out prior written permission of the course instructor in which the submission occurs."

Plagiarism is a serious offence, which cannot be resolved directly with the course’s instructor. The Associate Deans of the Faculty conduct a rigorous investigation, including an interview with the student, when an instructor suspects a piece of work has been plagiarized. Penalties are not trivial. They range from a mark of zero for the plagiarized work to a final grade of "F" for the course, and even suspension from all studies or expulsion from the University. For more infor-mation, see the web page on Academic Integrity at http://carleton.ca/studentaffairs/academic-integrity/.

Academic Accommodations You may need special arrangements to meet your academic obligations during the term be-cause of disability, pregnancy or religious obligations. Please review the course outline prompt-ly and write to me with any requests for academic accommodation during the first two weeks of class, or as soon as possible after the need for accommodation is known to exist. Students with disabilities requiring academic accommodations in this course must register with the Paul Menton Centre for Students with Disabilities (PMC) for a formal evaluation of disa-bility-related needs. Documented disabilities could include but are not limited to mobili-ty/physical impairments, specific Learning Disabilities (LD), psychiatric/psychological disabili-



ties, sensory disabilities, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and chronic medical conditions. Registered PMC students are required to contact the PMC, 613-520-6608, every term to ensure that your Instructor receives your Letter of Accommodation, no later than two weeks before the first assignment is due or the first in-class test/midterm requiring accommo-dations. If you only require accommodations for your formally scheduled exam(s) in this course, please submit your request for accommodations to PMC by Nov. 8, 2013 for the Fall term and March 7, 2014 for the Winter term. You can visit the Equity Services website to view the policies and to obtain more detailed in-formation on academic accommodation at http://carleton.ca/equity/accommodation.



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Geomorphology: Syllabus, Winter Term 2015 · 2014-06-03 · GEOG 3102: Geomorphology Syllabus |...

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