DEVELOPING VIRTUAL LAB ACTIVITIES FOR ONLINE GEOSCIENCE AND STEM TEACHER EDUCATION COURSES USING WEB-BASED DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Digital technologies (DT) provide a powerful tool to attract and engage students as well as enhance student learning in geoscience courses. Online courses are a perfect platform for virtual lab activities (VLA) that give students experience using real-world DT online while increasing their geoscience content knowledge. Incorporating DT such as Google Earth and online databases into geoscience and STEM teacher education courses is a great way to illustrate the importance of technology and mathematics to the sciences. Using free web-based DT in online STEM teacher education courses enables teachers in these courses to bring what they learned directly back to their own classrooms where these online VLA may be the only real-world science experience their K-12 students’ receive.

We developed and facilitated VLA for online versions of 1 undergraduate introductory geoscience course, 1 undergraduate upper-level geoscience course, and 3 graduate STEM teacher education courses that utilized web-based DT. The VLA utilized Google Earth to map and calculate surface area changes along coastlines through time. The VLA also utilized online databases from the 1) U.S. Energy Information Administration to compare production and consumption of coal and petroleum in different countries, 2) U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Cleanups in my Community to determine the density of polluted sites in specific cities, 3) U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s National Wetlands Inventory to compare changes in the surface area of wetlands over time, and 4) Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center and Gapminder World to compare the changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases over time. Additional web-based resources were used to determine the potential causes of the changes and trends identified in the Google Earth and online database VLA.

Course evaluations and surveys indicated that students thought the VLA were engaging and made learning geoscience interesting and fun. Student grades on the VLA and for the courses suggested that the pedagogical methods used in the courses increased student geoscience content knowledge and ability to use web-based DT. The graduate students that completed the STEM teacher education courses indicated that they appreciated being able to use what they learned in these courses in their own classrooms as teachers.