Examination arrangement

Course content

During COVID all European universities had to rapidly switch from the traditional in person lectures and technologies and fieldwork based educational activities, to digital lectures and activities.

This course aims to make students reflect about innovative digital education, and to enable them to participate and experience innovative online-digital-virtual geoscience lectures that will be developed by using appropriate digital tools.

Three virtual events and local follow up at NTNU, Trondheim will prepare students for the week in Olomouc (the April school). The April school schedule will be the following:

• Day 1 - Introduction of the April school and collective discussions about the virtual exchanges; lectures & methodological workshops on pedagogy and geoinformation technologies.
• Day 2- Lectures & methodological workshops on geography: equipment, visualisation, geotechnology, VR.
• Day 3 - intensive team works/hackathon - lecture designs creation and debriefings
• Day 4 - intensive team works/hackathon - lecture designs creation, mutual testing of lecture designs, and reflection
• Day 5 -finalising the lecture design workbooks templates; feedback, open discussion, brainstorming, and closure

Learning outcome

Knowledge:

The student has

• basic knowledge of applying GIS, visualization, and related technologies in digital learning environments
• knowledge of all elements of the TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) model such that this may be used when developing lesson-plans for teaching complex issues
• knowledge of how to use digital educational materials to learn geographical / geoscience principles and concepts
• knowledge of online/digital/virtual educational training solutions used during Covid-19 pandemic in Finland, Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, and Norway

Skills:

The student will

• be able to plan and teach geographical issues using geoparticipatory methods
• be able to use various digital applications in teaching and learning
• be able to use advanced models for lesson-planning for building lessons on geographical topics, using innovative methods for flipped classroom and blended learning
• be prepared to work in international and interdisciplinary environments

General competence:

The student has

• experiences about ways of transferring contact, technology- and field-based education to digital in the sense of methods and tools for geosciences training; to reinforce the quality of contact-based training in fully digital environments
• in-depth theoretical and practical knowledge about principles of lesson-planning
• accelerated their readiness and preparedness for the upcoming digital era in Geosciences education, and consequently at the European labour market
• experiences of digital education at different hosting institutions (Universities in Finland, Germany, Austria, and Czech Republic).

Learning methods and activities

Lectures, hands-on exercises, online exchanges, project and problem-based work, field work, group work

Compulsory assignments

• 3 virtual exchanges, 3 follow-up events, 5-days “April school” (90% attendance)

Further on evaluation

The compulsory assignments and the exam must be completed in English. Exceptions must be clarified with the lecturer responsible for the course.

Specific conditions

Required previous knowledge

Study entry is limited to 4 students, ideally 50% from Department of Geography and 50% from Department of Teacher Education. If less than 2 students have applied from each of these departments - the balance between them can alter.

Course materials

Teaching material will be available online under open license (creative commons or Open Database License for Geodata). Innovative teaching methods will include short educational clips (educlips), e-learning platform, multimedia online maps (e.g., StoryMap platform), GeoGames (e.g. wherIgo), low-cost VR apps, and many more.