Why OGGM-Edu?#

OGGM-Edu was created as an educational branch of the Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM) project. It is now largely independent from the main project and, we hope, has become a useful educational website! Here is what motivates us:

  • OGGM-Edu offers “hands-on” and practical activities, but only very little textbook content: we see the platform as an interactive complement to existing online resources.

  • Therefore, OGGM-Edu does not attempt to be a “one stop shop” for all things related to glaciers: our target groups are instructors and independent learners.

  • The main themes we are currently working on are the use of glacier models to learn about glaciers and climate change, with a focus on global issues (see-level rise, water availability, regional and global climate change): these topics have grown out of our own research interests and expertises, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. We are open for new ideas as well!

  • We rely on an open-source, decentralized and collaborative content creation system:

    • open-source: everything is available on our online repositories, with an open license allowing nonrestrictive reuse.

    • decentralized: content using OGGM-Edu or that can be run on OGGM-Edu does not have to be stored on our repositories. For example, out own notebooks are stored in a separate repository, and so are Lizz’ notebooks.

    • collaborative: thanks to the decentralized open-source model, any new modification and innovation can feed back into the original website, if the author of the new content chose a license allowing it (which we strongly encourage!).

  • We use tools familiar to scientists, not web developers: our apps and notebooks are written in the Python programming language, this website is written in the rst format. These tools are much easier to learn and adopt for scientists than, css, javascript or html for example. That way, we hope to engage more people to use and develop the website further.

If you want to know more, you can watch our recent seminar presentation explaining these points into more detail and demonstrating some of OGGM-Edu’s applications:

OGGM-Edu: an interactive platform to learn and teach about glaciers on Vimeo

The slides are available here (online version) or here (pdf) .