Teaching/Learning Strategies
There are a variety of different strategies used throughout the course that address different learning styles and provide interactive exercises to deepen understanding. These include:

Concept Maps: Visual representations of the relationship between concepts. At the start of each session, they are used to identify prior knowledge. At the end of each session, they document new knowledge.

"Jigsaw" activities: Cooperative learning activities where each person in a small team researches and brings back to the whole group part of the knowledge to be learned.

Reflection activities: Opportunities to integrate knowledge and to connect it to your own experience.

Web quests: Guided online searches about a specific topic.

Different ways to take the course

Credit/Online Facilitated: Colleges and universities can offer this course for credit. The course can be facilitated by a professor from the host institution. There will be ongoing facilitation and interaction between participants during the course. For information on hosting the course, see Licensing.

On Your Own: You may choose to work their way through the eight sessions individually or may organize a study group of colleagues to work with. Sessions six through eight are most effective if you discuss the strategies and situations with colleagues. When you take this course at pbs.org/evolution, you will be able to write your answers directly into text entry fields and then print out your answers.

Classroom setting: Universities or school districts can offer this as a face-to-face course with an in-class facilitator. Requirements for use in the classroom include high-speed Internet access and a projection device. Participants would be assigned segments of the sessions to do on their own between class meetings.

Selected lessons: Instructors may use selected sessions or activities from a session in other course offerings, either in a classroom or distance learning format. The first five sessions, focusing on evolutionary content, for example, are ideal to use with students who are not high school teachers but who need additional evolution background.