FOCUS in Climate: Flights of Courses Unified for Students

As climate change and weather become increasingly important to science, engineering, and policy work throughout the world, it is important to begin considering the effectiveness of the interdisciplinary collegiate curricula available on these topics. Carnegie Mellon University faculty have asked whether it would be worthwhile to create an interdisciplinary degree offering (undergraduate minor, undergraduate major, or graduate program) focusing on climate change. As a precursor exercise, we completed a needs assessment of the faculty, staff, and students regarding existing courses in this area. We focused on comparing lecturer and student expectations of learning, overlap of material across courses, and needs of instructors to manage these evolving topic areas. We used structured faculty interviews, student surveys, and syllabi analysis as research methods. Results indicated that courses have overlapping content, students have widely varied prior knowledge, and faculty have similar needs to remain current in the area. Our suggested outcome is to create a FOCUS area in climate: a structured set of courses and regular faculty interaction to showcase a new way of delivering the same material to students in a more streamlined fashion.