RAPID: Teaching field geology without classes in the field - providing a robust capstone experience through digital resources

Geoscience educators are facing a number of unexpected challenges as campuses transition to distance learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Principal among these is the realization that opportunities for experiential learning during spring and summer 2020 ? including traditional, field-based geologic courses and camps used as capstone experiences for undergraduate majors ? must rapidly make an unprecedented shift to distance learning or be cancelled altogether. The need is urgent: these experiences are critical opportunities for students to apply what they have learned throughout their undergraduate career. With most field-based capstones scheduled to begin in early May, 2020, there is not enough time for instructors to gain the expertise needed to develop and implement suitable virtual alternatives. A much more effective approach for addressing this crisis is coordinating a collective action to share expertise and activities. This project is helping our community develop and organize this collective momentum through an integrated series of professional, curricular, and digital infrastructure development initiatives. The project team is: (1) building avenues for sharing expertise within the community to enhance capacity for designing and implementing virtual field experiences; (2) collectively outlining the desired learning outcomes and skills that are developed during capstone field experiences; (3) constructing and populating a new online collection of activities, resources, and materials designed to meet those learning outcomes; and (4) reviewing and disseminating the products of this community-wide effort as a foundation for an educationally robust, virtual field camp. Resources being developed through this project will be freely available to the geoscience community. Activities are being tied to the community-derived learning outcomes and integrate cutting-edge technologies to accelerate geoscience students? exposure to digital learning tools, resources, and strategies that are rising in the profession (e.g., GoogleEarth, StraboSpot, ArcGIS PRO, etc.). The outcomes of this project will also help address the long-standing challenge of building field experiences that promote inclusivity, accessibility, and equity for those who are commonly marginalized by traditional field learning methods and experiences. Indeed, this effort will foster the creation and expansion of curricular tools and opportunities that can help geoscience students overcome barriers to participation (e.g., physical disabilities, financial concerns, cultural stigmas, or family obligations), help to reduce the novelty space associated with traditional, field-based experiences, and ultimately allow students to build relevant skills and confidence before going to the field.

The proposed approach to facilitating a rapid transition to virtual alternatives for traditional field camp in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to support groups of faculty in developing high-quality, peer-reviewed virtual/online activities that can be easily discovered in an online clearinghouse and integrated into an alternative capstone experience by any instructor. The first step in this process is to develop a community of expertise through a series of webinars involving field instructors. With help from the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, these webinars explore the challenges associated with the growing number of cancelled summer field courses, confirmed the urgency of the situation, and gauged interest in collaboratively developing new modules for virtual field instruction. The project team is coordinating with the National Association of Geoscience Teachers to establish web-based work spaces for nine working groups: (1) Learning objectives & assessment for field experiences; (2) Virtual class-related field trips; (3) Developing a community-based, virtual field camp; (4) Virtual hydrogeology/environmental field experiences; (5) Virtual geophysical field experiences; (6) Marine geology/sedimentology field experiences; (7) Working with virtual world technologies; (8) Digital tools for enhancing virtual field experiences; and (9) Non-field camp capstone experiences. The project team is hosting a one-day workshop based on the successful On the Cutting Edge (a cooperative professional development program run by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and the Science Education Resource Center) Building Strong Geoscience Departments Program to distill a new set of community-derived list of learning outcomes using a backward design approach. These new learning outcomes satisfy both virtual and field-based capstone experiences and provide a basis for arguing the equivalency of these programs to graduate school programs, professional licensure boards, and potential employers, that students affected by pandemic-related program changes will encounter in the future. With these new learning outcomes in hand, working groups quickly develop new high-quality curricular materials for virtual capstone experiences to meet the needs of distance learning pedagogies put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The new learning outcomes will then guide working groups in the compilation, development, and review of a new collection of online activities. The project team and working group leaders can engage a broad range of instructors through these working groups, match instructors with efforts to develop activities within their expertise, and collect feedback from potential users of the material. New activities will include the learning outcomes and skills they address and be uploaded to a searchable collection on the Teach the Earth website, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers' portal to Earth education resources that is hosted by the Science Education Resource Center. This website has well-established protocols for activity submission and the infrastructure needed to build searchable collections. Two levels of peer review using established rubrics will assess scientific accuracy; alignment of goals, activity, and assessment; pedagogical effectiveness; robustness (usability and dependability of all lesson components); and completeness of the web page for the activity to ensure successful implementation. Each activity will be connected to an overview page that introduces the learning objectives, associated pedagogical tips and strategies, and other resources as needed. These pages will help instructors to quickly select sets of activities that satisfy the learning outcomes of their particular capstone programs.


Funds to support this project are provided by the EAR Tectonics Program and the Division of Earth Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.