GOOGLE EARTH FOR ONSITE AND DISTANCE EDUCATION (GEODE)

The purpose of this digital poster presentation is to interactively demonstrate aspects of Project GEODE, a new collaboration involving the authors’ institutions as well as senior personnel, consultants, and industrial partners serving a diverse range of universities and colleges. This 4-year NSF TUES Type 3 project is aimed at developing and widely disseminating digital resources for undergraduate geoscience education based on the Google Earth virtual globe. Among the project goals are:

1) An online course consisting of a virtual “Grand Tour” of places every geoscience student should know about and appreciate. This will be organized as an inverse MOOC. Dozens of colleagues will be invited to record virtual field trips around the world and each student will select a subset of these to “follow” in order to complete their course assignments. Tours will include student interaction with GigaPans, virtual specimens, virtual outcrops, and game-style apps, including “egg hunts” where students are told to search for features in a panorama and the computer auto-scores their actions based on what locations they zoom to and focus on. Prototypes of all these features have already been developed and will be demonstrated;

2) Use of Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Engine to link big geoscience data sets to Google Earth and build these into learning modules. This will enable both onsite and distance students to have authentic undergraduate research experiences via data mining, collaborative analysis, and discovery of research results potentially leading to publications; and

3) Hosting of faculty professional development workshops. These will be offered at both national and regional meetings and online. The authors invite input during this digital poster demo to help guide the initial FPD planning process.

In addition to the authors, project partners include: Senior Consultant John Bailey, Assessors Apprendis Inc., manufacturers Four Chambers Studio, Publishers Pearson Inc., and senior personnel: Stephen Burgin and Mladen Dordevic (ODU), Jeff Ryan (USF), Paul Karabinos (Williams College), Barb Tewksbury (Hamilton College), Kristen St John (JMU), Terry Pavlis (UT El Paso), Heather Almquist (U MT), Cinzia Cervato (Iowa SU), Bill Richards (N Idaho College), Jen Piatek (Central Connecticut SU), and Ron Schott (Bakersfield CC).