Developing a supportive framework for field courses through video-based resources

Description

Field courses are an essential component of the bioscience undergraduate experience. They enable students to make connections between theory and practice that are impossible to achieve with normal classroom resources. However, the new fees regime and other issues (e.g. disability, family and work commitments, medical conditions, part-time study) make universal participation in field work difficult. It is imperative to ensure that such issues do not disadvantage students.

For attendees, field courses are intensive and expensive undertakings for participating students and it is essential to guarantee that resources and student time are used effectively. Underprepared students do not get the most from field courses, especially ones held in non-familiar locations, and staff time is consumed teaching the basics in situations that should be used to stretch students to the limits of their academic abilities in exciting and novel situations.

We propose to develop a suite of video based resources that fulfil the twin purposes of: (1) preparing biology and ecology students going on field work so that the experience is maximally effective; and (2) providing home-based students with superior resources for 'quasi-field work' than currently exist to ensure that they are not disadvantaged by non-field attendance.

To achieve these aims, three types of videos will be recorded: 'Techniques'; 'Context'; and 'Data' (the last depicting real behaviours, environments and ecological interactions for data collection and hypothesis testing). Videos will be recorded as part of an active, multi-institution field course to an overseas location, thereby increasing the novelty and the opportunity for students to develop an enquiry-based approach.In addition to the great support this will give to the teaching at the institutions involved, resources arising from the project will be freely available online through a Creative Commons License for other institutions to use directly, or modify to their own needs.The videos will be supplied with contextual material as well as a series of resources to enable students to develop a questioning attitude to the novel situations they will experience. This will allow them to develop projects within a problem-based learning framework and complete the projects using the videos supplied.