Abstract
One of the most significant challenges associated with field education is providing students with effective feedback regarding recently completed exercises. Ideally, instructors would return to a field area and walk students through key locations to reinforce the geologic relationships students should have captured in observations. Unfortunately, time and resources needed to support such return trips make them impractical. Additionally, these return trips often only provide group feedback, missing the needs of individuals and lacking meaningful feedback on primary observation skills and in-field interpretations. When taken together, these drawbacks generally lead instructors to limit feedback to written comments on student work and verbal walkthroughs that rely upon student memories of field relationships that they may not fully understand.Here, we offer a novel application of virtual field trips (VFTs) to provide students with meaningful post-field-activity feedback and opportunities for reflection. These VFTs are built around annotated photo spheres that allow student and instructor to virtually revisit key locations to highlight geologic relationships and to provide students with significantly more meaningful feedback regarding observational skills and the process of formulating data-based interpretations. To test this approach, we conducted a traditional, field-based introductory geologic mapping activity for lower-division undergraduate students at Rainbow Basin, California. Student performance was assessed using standard rubrics. However, in addition to written comments on their maps, the students also received individualized feedback using a VFT of key locations created from photospheres taken with the Google Street View Mobile App and compiled into a tour using Pano2VR software. This VFT also contained embedded detailed outcrop photos and toggleable geologic interpretations. This allowed instructors to provide robust and relevant feedback tailored to the individual student. Not only were students able to see what geologically permissible maps would look like, but also exactly what they did not observe or may have misinterpreted in the field that may have contributed to mapping errors.