CHALLENGES AND EMERGING BEST PRACTICES FOR USING VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY IN GEOSCIENCE CLASSROOMS

Virtual and augmented reality field trips can open the door to valuable experiential learning opportunities afforded by traditional field trips to students who are unable to attend traditional field trips due to mobility issues, distance education barriers, budgetary constraints or other limitations. Examples of these types of products are being developed independently by institutions across North America, leading to the rapid innovation of new tools designed to simulate or enhance traditional field trips. Three aspects that are especially attractive to us as geoscience educators are their ability to offer field-based learning across time, space and scale. While these technologies are new and exciting, they still require informed design based on sound pedagogical principles. More specifically, instructors should consider: 1) limitations on content creation; 2) how important flexibility and accessibility are for students; and 3) what level of interaction is needed. Perhaps most importantly, instructors should ask themselves what type of technology helps their students best achieve previously-established learning objectives. Many uses of virtual and augmented reality in education currently focus on testing new technologies rather than helping students learn.

In this presentation, we offer a preliminary framework to help guide instructor’s choices when developing/using virtual and augmented reality products. We apply this framework to two newly-developed virtual reality field trips, one built for the HTC Vive and another developed for use in a phone-based headset such as Google Cardboard, to highlight potential pitfalls and emerging best practices in developing applications that maximize the benefit for undergraduate geoscience students.