Abstract. Cross-disciplinary training in the earth sciences is a difficult issue that elicits concerns in academia and industry. Many of the problems associated with cross-disciplinary training stem from the fact that the earth sciences have evolved as a collection of loosely-related, poorly-coordinated specialties with little communication or interaction between them. This makes it difficult for earth scientists to provide the public with a coherent education in the fundamentals of earth science and it has impeded the development of a common foundation for interaction between earth-science specialists.
We have begun the development of a computer-based learning environment for use in cross-disciplinary education. This does not simply involve providing traditional course and lecture notes in an electronic form. Rather, it attempts to approach the problem of cross-disciplinary teaching in a fundamentally new way that stresses conceptual learning through the use of a series of interactive case studies. While emphasizing the content important to building interdisciplinary understanding, the implementation of the course is designed to meet the needs of a diversity of students and institutions by allowing for delivery via a variety of mechanisms, customizability, and time and location independence of access.
As an example of the program we are advocating, we have developed a course in introductory geophysical exploration available to anyone by accessing http://www.mines.edu/fs_home/tboyd/GP311/. To take full advantage of this course students must; 1) have access to the WWW, 2) be able to send and receive e-mail, 3) have access to any commercially available spreadsheet, and 4) have access to a symbolic mathematical package (the currently supported packages are Matlab and Mathematica) or a Java knowledgable Web browser.