McLaren, Sandra, Green, Eleanor, Anderson, Marion, and Finch, Melanie (2024) The importance of active-learning, student support, and peer teaching networks: A case study from the world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, Australia. Journal of Geoscience Education. (In Press)

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Abstract

In the Australian state of Victoria, the city of Melbourne endured the world’s longest number of lockdown days, with severe government health orders and travel restrictions in place for extended periods of 2020 and 2021. In common with others, we found the provision of field teaching in introductory geology, structural geology, and volcanology, and the online replacement of practical instruction in petrology and petrography to be the greatest pedagogical challenges. We developed and used a range of different virtual field excursions that, given time and travel constraints imposed on us, were necessarily “low-tech” and non-immersive. Despite this, our students largely engaged enthusiastically with the virtual excursions, met many preexisting learning goals, and gained additional skills, particularly in regional-scale geological synthesis. In teaching petrology and petrography online, curated resources improved student understanding of some fundamental concepts, and it was advantageous that students were all assessed using identical imagery, rather than one sample from a non-identical class-set. On the other hand, we found we were less able to train students in the advanced skills of thin section interpretation. Assessment changes associated with online teaching have resulted in a permanent shift from low-level recall-style assessments to instead emphasizing higher-level synthesis and “geological thinking” skills. Our efforts throughout the pandemic demonstrated the value of instructor-student engagement and yielded teaching resources that have subsequently enhanced our face-to-face teaching and increased flexibility for students. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of collaborative teaching practice and we have increasingly seen the benefits of local and national-scale teaching networks for peer support and for resource sharing.

Item ID:	79925
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2158-1428
Copyright Information:	© 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited:	16 Aug 2023 04:58
FoR Codes:	39 EDUCATION > 3901 Curriculum and pedagogy > 390113 Science, technology and engineering curriculum and pedagogy @ 100%
SEO Codes:	16 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 1603 Teaching and curriculum > 160304 Teaching and instruction technologies @ 50% 16 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 1603 Teaching and curriculum > 160302 Pedagogy @ 50%
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