The concept of rangeland health and an ecological site description (ESD) are fairly recent developments in rangeland assessment and are still undergoing refinement. Since these are tools that will be used by today’s students in their careers, it is desirable to provide field experience in protocol.  At the University of Nebraska Lincoln, an introductory range course is taught in the fall semester. By the time students are equipped to determine rangeland health indicators, the growing season has ended and weather often precludes field work. We developed an instructional module in which student teams used an aggregated population sampling board and an online photo bank to “collect data” to determine rangeland health and the stable community state of an ESD for a chosen major land resource area (MLRA). Knowing the population parameters of the sampling board, we worked backwards from Nebraska ESDs and assigned biotic and abiotic attributes to disks on the sampling board to predestine teams to arrive at target stable states of the ESD. Teams presented their findings orally to their peers and submitted a written summary to the instructor. The module was first used in Fall 2006 and student response to the exercise was favorable.  The module will be used again in Fall 2007. We were guided by the interagency publication Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health, and stressed to students the further experience and knowledge necessary to implement the process in the real world.