Inter-Commission C1-F2-F3-H2 WG Education and Training in Astrobiology

Description

Role and goals of the WG :

The role of this WG is to coordinate training, education and outreach activities in astrobiology at the international level by :

creating an international network for education and providing training material for basic, secondary and higher education,
providing a comprehensive multidisciplinary astrobiology curriculum for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as early career scientists,
initiating, coordinating and carrying out initiatives in outreach for the general public and training the specialists (journalists, etc.)
training the university lecturers in astrobiology (e.g how to teach biology to astronomers or astronomy to biologists, how to evaluate multidisciplinary courses, etc)
training the high-school biology, geology, physics and chemistry teachers and educators to teach astrobiology within their own subject disciplines

4 main goals have been identified:

Goal 1 :

To collect all lectures and conferences in astrobiology which have been recorded during the last 10 years (whatever the language is), to categorize them according to their field and the public concerned (from general public to specialist of the field), and to make them available for free on this website so that people with few financial ressources can access them remotely.

Goal 2 :

To produce handbooks and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for university students - pooling the individual national efforts that are already in progress over the world

To develop outreach for the general public and high school teachers. As an example, some astrobiology books only published in English might deserve to be translated into other languages,

Goal 3 :

To create an annual international astrobiology training school (TS) lasting 1-2 weeks, which would train the young generation in the basics of astrobiology. This TS could be a 6 year cycle during which the program could cycle through the 6 regions: Asia, Australia, Europe, North America , South America and Southern Africa. Collaboration with ISYAs and COSPAR will be carefully investigated for implementing this TS.

Goal 4 :

To organize a regular international workshop on education in astrobiology in order to discuss how to carry out multidisciplinary training in astrobiology, how to evaluate students, and above all to share all training materials that each country may have developed but kept in its national drawers.