Democratizing Virtual Field Trips: Teaching Learners to Create Their Own Virtual Field Trips for Earth and Space Science and Sustainability

Abstract:

Our past research has shown that browser-based virtual field trips (VFTs) effectively bring learners to scientifically and culturally important places. Keys to the strength of this modality are that VFTs enable learning by exploration and can leverage sense of place to motivate learning. Advancing technology and increasing ubiquity of high-quality audiovisual recorders now make it possible for any educator or student to learn by creating and sharing their own basic place-based VFTs.

Our proof-of-concept project in teaching VFT production was intended to (1) demonstrate the feasibility of such courses; (2) identify learning outcomes of the method; and (3) discover whether learner-produced VFTs serve other learners. We piloted two university courses and a high-school summer camp. Learners worked in small groups with close support from instructors and technical advisors. Each group selected a locally relevant science or sustainability topic, storyboarded their VFT, identified and visited locations to capture audiovisual content, created additional text and images, and built the VFT from a digital template. They also learned from guest experts in instructional design, photography and videography, and journalism.

We collected evaluation data in the university courses, including both pre-/post-course and post-course-only surveys. Although they are small samples, the responses from the students have been uniformly positive, with students reporting strong learning gains related to narrative and media production. We have also deployed the student-produced VFTs in undergraduate courses to understand their impact on other students. These students (n = 253) rated them positively on communicating their topic (4.2; all responses on a five point scale) and on inspiring action by other students (3.8) and moderately well on engagement (3.4) and learning (3.3).

Future work will more rigorously examine student learning outcomes associated with this course, including improving approaches to measuring growth in sense of place. We have also begun to train teachers to offer such a course themselves and to have their own students learn science through VFT creation. We expect that this new approach will benefit the trained teachers as well as increase the number of students with access to this novel educational experience.