LEARNING ON ICE: DEVELOPMENT OF ONLINE LEARNING RESOURCES FOR GLACIAL GEOLOGY USING GIGAPAN TECHNOLOGY

Field exercises are essential in geoscience education. Field trips, where concepts and processes can be examined in situ, allow students the opportunity to explore geologic settings to enhance their expertise and develop higher-order learning skills, including the ability to solve problems in varying situations. Unfortunately, significant amounts of fieldwork are often difficult to incorporate into classes, particularly large introductory courses that serve a wide student audience. In addition, field trips are practical only to local sites, limiting what concepts can be explored in the field during a typical geoscience course of study.

To overcome these issues, we have been developing exercises that utilize virtual field trips based on high-resolution zoomable panoramas that allow students to gain experience interpreting outcrops and landscapes. The panoramas are created with a digital camera, a GigaPan robotic camera mount, and associated software. Assembled panoramas are uploaded to the GigaPan website (http://www.gigapan.com), where they can be viewed. One significant advantage of high-resolution pans over traditional static visualizations is the ability of students to be actively engaged by panning and zooming within the image. Clickable 'snapshot' links associated with online GigaPan images guide the user to specific locations within the panorama. These explorable images are well suited for use in open-ended inquiry-based exercises at all levels of geoscience education.

Virtual field exercises have been developed for a number of undergraduate courses within the CCSU geoscience curriculum, most recently using panoramas of Swiss alpine glaciers and other features related to glacial geology. GigaPan images of the Aletsch Glacier (the longest glacier in the Alps), the iconic Matterhorn, and the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau area are used for the exploration of glacial landscapes [search for ‘CCSUGlaciers’ on the GigaPan site] . Features present on the panoramas include cirque and valley glaciers, snow lines, crevasses, supra-glacial stream channels, trim lines, erosional landforms, moraines, and outwash systems. Exercises are suitable for use in a range of courses, including introductory geology, glacial geology, geomorphology, and planetary geology.