Fieldwork is a fundamental component of geoscience education, but it is inherently exclusionary for students from lower socioeconomic status, with health or mental impairments, or with inflexible family obligations. To future-proof the UU BSc curriculum, mandated courses like fieldwork must offer inclusive, accessible alternatives. This project will fill this need by creating and evaluating the effectiveness of an interactive Virtual FieldTrip (iVFT) to a field site in Canada.

Background information

The iVFT is a complement to existing in-person fieldworks and would make the UU BSc curriculum more inclusive and equitable for all students, especially who cannot perform in person fieldwork. Taken in modular form, the iVFT can serve as a challenge-based, blended learning tool and be embedded in existing BSc and MSc courses.

Aims

The overarching goal of this project is to create an interactive virtual fieldtrip (iVFT, cf. Mead et al., 2019) for Mont Albert (Canada) to provide an inclusive “field” experience for UU BSc students (and students all over the world) who are unable to physically do fieldwork.

Project description

I propose to create an iVFT for an active research locality at Mont Albert in Québec, Canada, which will embed geological and physical geography data, landscape footage, explanatory videos/knowledge clips, and spatially referenced 3D outcrops in a user-friendly GoogleEarth interface. Year 1/Year 2 BSc students will be prompted to explore the multimedia and make critical choices while “navigating the field site” to answer modular challenge-based
questions of increasing difficulty related to first-order field skills and applied geoscience content knowledge.Mont Albert is a world-class record of ophiolite obduction during Wilson Cycle oceanic closure (a topic currently missing from, but complementary to, existing BSc fieldworks) and provides clear examples of the interaction between tectonics, lithology, climate, and morphology.

Results

This project would be a step towards a more inclusive UU BSc curriculum, and ensure that the BSc curriculum is
future-proof and capable of training all candidates equitably. The iVFT could provide a (partial) alternative to in-person fieldwork, as well as a tool to facilitate blended learning in BSc and MSc courses.

References

• Mead, C., Buxner, S., et al. (2019). Immersive, interactive virtual field trips promote science learning. Journal of Geoscience Education, 67(2), 131-142;