Through an odd sequence of events—actually, not odd but academically sad, I am going to be teaching the intro astronomy course this semester. OK, if you MUST know the reason, here it goes.

You know I love teaching this Physics for Elementary Education majors course, right? Yes—it uses the Next Gen PET curriculum (which is AWESOME). I put this course together sometime around 2005 for the College of Education. They needed a hands on science course to satisfy their accreditation requirements and this course fit that need. It worked PERFECTLY.

Flash forward to today. Apparently the College of Education decided to drop this course from their curriculum without even telling us. Oh, am I bitter—maybe a little. But since the course isn’t required, I only had 2 students registered. The class was canceled and I picked up an astronomy course. The end.

Now for the astronomy class. This is a class for non-science majors, so essentially no math. I have taught it before, but that was maybe 10 years ago. I want it to be a great course, but I don’t have a lot of time to find some resources. That means I ask twitter for help.

I picked up an astronomy class for the fall (non-science majors). Anyone have some great materials for class? I love some good clicker questions – but I'm open to anything.

— Rhett Allain (@rjallain) August 5, 2019

Here are some of the suggestions.

• Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy https://www.slader.com/textbook/9780321820464-lecture-tutorials-for-introductory-astronomy-3rd-edition/
• The Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project https://astro.unl.edu/naap/
• Class Action (clicker questions) https://astro.unl.edu/classaction/
• ConcepTests for Introductory Astronomy http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~pgreen/educ/ConcepTests.html
• More University of Nebraska stuff https://astro.unl.edu/classaction/questionsList.html

I’ll post more stuff as I find them.