Reinhold Leinfelder's online reef lecture

This web based course is thought to support the 'realiter'-reef course of the author. At the same time, it is designed to allow autodidactic study through the web. Most parts of the course will be available freely but we will ask you to register at no cost for statistical purpose (at a later stage of development of this course).

The course is primarily meant for university students inscribed in a geology/palaeontology, geoscience or biology course. Geology students might find a bit too much of biology, biology students a bit too much on geology, but this is how transdisciplinary education (and the reef system itself!) works. We also see geography students as well as school, high school or university teachers of biology, geography, geology, or sciences as possible audience. Naturally, any other school or university student, dive instructors, petroleum geoscientist, coastal manager, environmental advisor, journalist or anyone else interested is welcome to use this course (given the copyright limitations outlined in the copyright-section).

This course will be written in English language in order to reach a broader audience. English is not my mother tongue, so I apologize for spelling and grammar mistake or poor style. Any improvements are highly welcome. Thank you, Reinhold Leinfelder

Structure:

Each chapter of the course will include the following resources:

html-Text with figures and line drawings, where appropriate with animations;
additional photographs and figures with short captions ("slide shows");
additional resources in the web, including video clips, virtual reality-objects, pdf-files, other web articles or other online presentations, where appropriate;
relevant literature where necessary;
Questions and answers for self tests (most will only be added after completion of vers 1.0 of course)
The course is also open for 3rd-party modules, so if you have developed a supporting module, let us know.

Discussion with the lecturer and among course students will be possible via a discussion forum and a mail list server. RL will also answer questions directly by email (I will, however, not work out your school or university seminar talks for you ;-)

Tipp: You may use the 'Ask a Palaeo'-Question and Answer Forum at www.palaeo.de/forum, as long as the ReefCourse-Forum is not set up or send emails to RL by using reinhold@riffe.de

Course evolution: The building up of this online course will be an iterative approach, i.e. I will try to proceed rapidly with the first version. Text corrections, inclusion of more figures, videos and animations, as well as a search engine, and layout optimizations will be subsequently achieved by updating earlier versions.

## The author has hoped to get assistance by acceptance of a respective proposal. This proposal was unfortunately not accepted. I will nevertheless try to proceed with this online course, but owing to many other responsabilities (see www.palaeo.de/leinfelder if interested) this will be a slow process. ##

This is a lecture so information given in this course may be scientifically incorrect or out-of-date (hope not!). Do not cite information in this course in scientific articles, but refer to the original literature. In other cases, this course may be cited as:

Leinfelder, R. (2002-04): The online Reef Course.- http://www.palaeo.de/edu/reefcourse, GeoBio-Center^LMU, Munich.

1.1 Purpose and Structure of this Site

Purpose:

Structure: