Web-based fieldwork education system for students

The spread of COVID-19 has cancelled and postponed many geoscience exercise and fieldwork activities worldwide. Various virtual fieldtrips and online courses were offered to the students to overcome this education gap. In this study, we combined virtual fieldwork with self-fieldwork exercise by creating a new fieldwork education system called ‘GeoExplorer’. ‘GeoExplorer’ is a fieldwork instruction webpage (platform), where students can easily access the platform with mobile phones and visit the fieldwork site without an instructor or a teacher. The platform provides detailed fieldwork description and instructs how the student should travel along the site. The system is fairly simple, as the student follow the map of the fieldwork site provided by the platform, the platform will explain the geology and geographic features of each stop points. This fieldwork education platform is created on the geoscience database platform ‘Geo Big Data Open Platform’ of Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM). Therefore, the students can easily access detailed geological maps and geoscience information of Korea created by actual geologists and earth scientists of Korea. Currently, three geo-sites are offered for the students to explore (we plan to add more sites in the following years). These geo-sites are not only geologically important but also academically important since they contain the most recent geoscience research outcomes in Korea. We hope this new geoscience fieldwork education approach can encourage students to participate in geoscience fieldwork activities during and after the pandemic.