The online learning environment can add substantial advantages to learning such as continuous access to material and the ability to foster learning through additional visual supplemental materials, but it can also add further challenges that may not be as evident when teaching traditional, face-to-face courses. An individual's place affiliation may impact learning outcomes in geographically-dependent science content-specific science courses such as geoscience courses. This study focused on challenges associated with teaching and assessing geographically-dependent content in online master's level geology and meteorology courses. Students in these courses were asked to identify their home regions prior to the start of the master's program. When assessments for both courses were analyzed using a repeated-measures test, meteorology courses revealed significant differences between students' home regions for multiple assessments.