EMPHASIZING CRITICAL FIELD SKILLS IN AN ONLINE SUMMER FIELD COURSE

We designed and implemented a fully online summer field course adapted to the situational factors of our students and our department’s program learning outcomes. Here, we comment on the situational factors, highlight some of the course learning outcomes, and discuss the novel activities we developed to achieve those outcomes. Others in the geoscience community have made substantial efforts to develop accessible and inclusive alternative field experiences and technologies, many of which were fast-tracked and gained a broader audience at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our design borrows from these previous efforts with our own unique elements aimed at minimizing financial burden and technological barriers.

Rather than try to create a holistic experience commensurable with a traditional field camp program, we identified a specific set of skills that are critical to the field experience: 3D visualization and spatial analysis, field logistics and field data collection strategies, data analysis and synthesis, professional written communication, and effective collaboration. We used these skills to frame our learning outcomes, and we developed four virtual field projects to address these skills. The virtual field projects were based on locations for which the instructors had their own, unpublished field data. Students spent the first week of the course learning how to import these data and create geologic maps in Google Earth. For the first field project, they were given all pertinent field data. By the end of the semester, students worked in teams to “collect” their own project data by plotting traverses through their field areas on Google Earth, using the satellite imagery to identify points of interest and topographic map overlays to determine navigability as predetermined by the instructors. The instructors then generated field data sets based on each team’s traverse that not only allowed the students to construct their geologic maps but to reflect on their data collection strategies and adjust as needed to improve data coverage and robustness. Our virtual field projects require large time commitments from instructors, but we found that they not only help achieve course learning outcomes but also ensure instructor presence and student engagement in an otherwise asynchronous online platform.