Two interactive geology videos, pre- and post-field visit, will introduce students to the complexity of field work in a self-paced learning environment before they visit the field area, and provide an opportunity for students to go over their newly-learned skills after the field visit.  The stress of assessment will also be removed from the field visit and incorporated into the post-field visit video.

My name is Mary Gee (School of Earth Sciences – SES), I’m providing the geology input, and Akos Bruz (Pawsey at UWA) is producing the videos. Our team has grown from ‘just the two of us’ to include Eun-Jung Holden and Weronika Gorczyk (both from SES and the Centre for Exploration Targeting) who are providing technical expertise and ideas for the interactivity and virtual aspects of the videos.

What triggered the idea? Students always find field trips overwhelming, especially early on in their academic careers, there is just too much ‘happening’, outcrops are too ‘busy’. Learning how to filter what they see, what observations to record, and which data to collect IS part of any field course, but this takes time. Drawing ‘what a geologist sees’ in the field and providing labelled images (as above) does help, but it would be better to make this into a video, and even better to have a variety of pathways through the video depending on an individual’s answers to a series of questions. If students can drop in and out of the videos away from UWA, travelling to and from campus and at home for instance, this would be ideal.

Akos and I are filming on location (Pt Peron) tomorrow, so my next post will be a report on the success of the expedition.

Mary

PS     We haven’t thought of a short and snappy title yet, any suggestions considered, including acronyms (however contrived), they can’t be worse than the latest NASA project: Oceans Melting Greenland https://omg.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/

Now, as to a prize, hmmmmm, I can run to coffee and cake!