welcome, ecotypes.us!: new survey and resources available now

[James Proctor]

Dear EcoTypes colleagues — As you heard in mid-June, I've been busy doing EcoTypes analysis, survey revision, and website development this summer...and it's now ready to share with you! Go to:

ecotypes.us

If you can, I'd love to hear your thoughts/questions/feedback via this form. You may use that same form to contact me for assistance and support as you plan to implement EcoTypes in your courses in 2021-22.

At bottom (from Instructor FAQ) is a summary of some big changes effective this summer. You'll read that the EcoTypes site is increasingly focused on helping your students and others explore their environmental ideas via a now-briefer survey and report, while many of the supplementary conceptual materials will be expanded and updated into a book. (In the meantime, some existing materials from the original website will be compiled into an instructor packet.)

I want to thank those of you who participated in a June AESS conference workshop, and more recently three international collaborators, for your input toward many improvements we have recently made to EcoTypes. My current collaborators will launch a cross-national initiative this coming year! They include:

• Naciba Chassagnon, Professor, Economics and Management, ESSCA School of Management, Lyon, France
  
• Aideen Foley, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
  
• Sailaja Nandigama, Associate Professor, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, BITS Pilani, Rajasthan, India

Soon I will introduce two Lewis & Clark students, Mia Babasyan and Liv Ladaire, who are working with me on EcoTypes. They have some exciting improvements, visual resources, and social media ideas of their own to add to the initiative...stay tuned.

Okay, thanks again, keep in touch, and below are some of the changes to the EcoTypes site effective this summer.

Regards,

Jim P.

***

EcoTypes site changes summer 2021 [from website]

Starting summer 2021 we have introduced some key improvements in EcoTypes, and we will all learn together how to get the most educational benefit from these improvements:

• The EcoTypes site is accessed via ecotypes.us. If you’ve used the old EcoTypes site in past, there may be a redirect, but make sure and note this change!
• The site has been fully redesigned to be more colorful, image- and video-rich, and fun. We want your students to explore the site, and to use site resources to understand their survey results.
• The site has a set of Going Deeper exercises throughout, which students can do on their own or as part of guided reflection and writing assignments. 
• The survey is now much shorter, and can be completed in about 10-15 minutes. This may give you more opportunities, e.g., to administer the survey at the start and end of your course to compare changes.
• The survey is fully anonymous. This means that instructors desiring their student survey data (see FAQ) will need to arrange with Prof. Proctor for their students to insert a unique institutional code in the comments field at end. It also means that instructors will need to come up with their own ways of tracking who has completed the survey, e.g., to award credit.
• The survey report is immediately delivered online, and retrievable in future via a special code at the top of the report. This may make it easier for students to retrieve and share their reports at any time, but does require online access unless the report is printed or saved as PDF.
• The survey report has a helpful FAQ for students to better appreciate the underlying statistical methodology and interpret their results. 
• And most, most important, the survey report now includes EcoTypes, not just axes and themes. We are very excited about the learning potential of these EcoTypes!…but have only begun to explore how best to incorporate them into a course.

There is another change starting summer 2021: the website no longer contains the detailed content on each axis and theme, and additional online resources, as we have decided they would best reside in a companion book. We hope in the meantime to provide existing resources from the original website to instructors in a PDF packet; send us a request and we’ll provide you one.