The "Course Description Exercise" by Emmanuel Kazuva is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
OGE 121: Background to Physical Resources
Course Description
This course, Background to physical resources introduces to you the basic concepts of the solid earth. It observes the main physical environments of earth, namely atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere. The atmosphere affects the surface of the earth and makes up weather and climates. Biosphere elements are plants and animals of which physical geography looks at their distribution and variation. The course takes the role of Geography of describing and explaining the earth's solid and its variation from time to time and place to place, including planetary system, geology& geomorphology, topography and soils. It examines the effects and characteristics of processes and earth's surface features, their formation, deformation and modification. All these will be covered under a number of main lectures/topics, including; Geology and Geomorphology, Material of the Earth crust and rocks forming process, Geomorphic and Morphodynamic processes, Oceanography and coastal processes. Others topics are Desert Processes and Desertification, Soil and Climatology. The course, therefore, is meant to introduce to you the main concepts and processes of nature phenomena and show their relationship with human beings.
Objectives of the course
The course intends to enable student to:-
1. Understand the main forces and processes of nature that have taken place.
2. Identify the earth major geological and topographic features as coursed by endogenic exogenic processes (volcanicity, fan thing, fording etc)
3. Describe main components of soil, formation and properties.
4. Analyze current processes taking place on the earth surface – weathering and mass wasting
5. Describe and Analyze atmospheric processes taking place (Climatology)
6. Describe the evolution, characteristics and distribution of world’s natural vegetation; and
7. Discuss the intricate linkages and interactions existing between man and natural vegetation.
The Target Audience
This course is intended for students from different academic backgrounds that are taking Geography as a major or minor subject of the program they are perusing at OUT. This includes students from various fields like Education, Environment, Natural Resources etc. It is also recommended for Tourism students and others from different fields that are little biased to environment or natural resources, as may be directed by course advisors from their home faculty/ department.
Course Duration
The course duration is one (1) Academic Year