Virtual Fieldwork for Oceanography: the Virtual Ship Classroom

Fieldwork is an essential component of many higher education programs, but in marine sciences fieldwork opportunities are scarce. We have therefore designed a digital learning experience. Our virtual fieldwork is suitable for students, early-career scientist and staff who want to practice conducting an expedition and can openly be adjusted to other fields of research.

Virtual fieldwork is a relatively new concept, often incorporating Virtual Reality (VR). It has the potential to offer many benefits to students, such as being more inclusive, building student skills and confidence, and increasing engagement in the topic studied. The virtual ship classroom has been designed as an authentic learning environment[1] that reflects real-world oceanographic research practices and planning where students are empowered through choice to direct their own learning.

Students formulate a research question, plan and prepare for an expedition, and virtually measure ocean fields. The data is generated by our python tool in such a way that the output closely resembles the datafiles that are generated by the equipment onboard research vessel. This allows students to work with and interpret realistic data files while investigating a phenomenon of their own choice.

We have recently added VR in the form of 360° videos to the virtual ship classroom. We are actively investigating the added value, engagement and immersion students experience though design-based research[2].

We collaborated with course instructors to set intended learning goals and evaluated the virtual fieldwork (in four graduate-level classes so far) using interviews with students, instructors and teaching assistants, surveys, rubrics, and notebooks/assignments.

We find the Virtual Ship Classroom contributes positively to learning outcomes and student satisfaction, because the learning is highly student driven and perceived as authentic. The students reported high levels of engagement in class and with the learning materials. They appreciated their growth in terms of content knowledge, real world research planning skills, data analysis and collaborative problem solving. As such, we believe this type of authentic virtual fieldwork will help students develop critical 21^st century skills and should be transferred to other fields of research as well.

All material is open source and available online: github.com/OceanParcels/virtualship. We welcome anyone in the world to use and contribute to the Virtual Ship Classroom.

[1] Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., & Oliver, R. (2014). Authentic Learning Environments. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. Elen, & M. J. Bishop (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 401–412). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3185-5_32

[2] Design-Based Research Collective. (2003). Design-Based Research: An Emerging Paradigm for Educational Inquiry. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 5–8. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032001005