Learn About Birds From Anywhere: New Online Webinar and Course Offerings

By Kevin McGowan, Education Department, Cornell Lab May 17, 2013

Sample screenshot from online tutorial — These are a few sample screenshots from Cornell Lab online tutorials.

These are a few sample screenshots from Cornell Lab online tutorials.

New online-learning offerings are the latest additions to the Cornell Lab’s collection of educational materials. The options now range from live, one-hour webinars with an expert ornithologist all the way to an in-depth, college-level correspondence course with a 1,200-page textbook.

If you enjoy watching and learning about birds, you might like the chance to investigate a little deeper with one or more of our courses. From simplest to most in-depth, here’s what we offer:

NEW: a series of Be a Better Birder webinars. We currently are offering a four part series on waterfowl identification (May–June 2013), and are working on more topics. The live, one-hour webinars are conducted by an expert ornithologist on our staff and include instruction, polling the audience about mystery photos, and a chance to ask questions.
NEW: a self-paced series of Be a Better Birder tutorials aimed at beginning birders who want solid instruction in the basics of bird identification. The tutorials build on the concepts introduced in the Inside Birding and Building Skills sections of All About Birds. They feature interactive components to help you practice your skills, rather than just telling you how. You can go through them as many times as you like for 6 months after you sign up.
Investigating Behavior: Courtship and Rivalry in Birds is a five-week online course perfect for people whose interests lie beyond identification, and who want to know how and why birds communicate and display. It’s been a popular course over the last four years, taken by more than 650 people in 19 countries.
Our Home Study Course in Bird Biology is a comprehensive correspondence course in ornithology that has been taken by tens of thousands of people from all over the globe in the 41 years it has been offered.

The Education program at the Cornell Lab is dedicated to providing opportunities for lifelong learning about birds in a variety of ways to a multitude of audiences all over the world —and we’ll continue working on new ones. Already the most common response on our post-webinar surveys is, “More, please. What other ones will you offer?”