Quarantine volcanology: a free divulgation e-learning strategy in Latin America during the first-wave SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak

Abstract:

During 2020, the novel coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) transformed into a global impact pandemic, forcing most of the world’s countries to adopt strong social distancing measures to reduce its impacts. Latin America, which was lately affected, is inherently vulnerable due to its economic, social and demographic reality, but also highly exposed to natural hazards (e.g. earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, flooding, etc.). In order to overcome the limitations imposed by social distancing and provide distractive and valuable learning for volcanic-risk reduction to the society, we designed a free e-learning strategy with a massive quarantine volcanology course (QVC). QVC consisted of three major thematic areas (volcanism, volcanic hazards and applied volcanology) with 22 modules in video, totalling 27 h (https://www.explorock.com/curso-online-volcanologia-sociedad/). About 6,000 people from all Latin American countries attended, and nearly 3,000 got a certification through the approval of three voluntary evaluations. Together with this novel QVC, we present the results of a survey conducted to evaluate: a) general information of the participants; b) their personal experience during the course; c) their changing perceptions about volcanoes during the QVC; d) their dealing strategies with the QVC during the outbreak and e) an auto-evaluation of the acquired knowledge. From a total of 963 respondents, ~70% were aged 20-29 (normal distribution; range from 13 to 75 years old). The 24% participants were unemployed, while 47% were college students. Almost 50% of the respondents reported to be affected by the pandemic while 74% of them carried out quarantine. Through this unprecedented QVC, volcanology has become accessible to a large number of audiences, providing scientific knowledge to a diverse community in terms of gender, age, training and provenance. After QVC, ~90% participants declare to successfully identify different types of volcanoes, understand volcanic hazards, and understand the value and limitations of science in eruption forecasting, while 74% are confident to understand volcanic hazard maps.