5 D4. The Geoscience Community: Strategies and Practices for Enhancing Diversity, Learning, and Information Sharing

Monday, 9 March 2020
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Meeting Room 201C

GEOSCIENCE EDUCATIONAL VIDEO DESIGN: LESSONS LEARNED FROM ASSESSMENT OF A VIDEO ABOUT THE PERMIAN BASIN

Paper number: 5-4
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:45 AM – 9:05 AM

Authors

Abstract

Well-crafted videos on geoscience phenomena can be useful supplements for undergraduate education and making high-quality video content has become a much more accessible skill. However, in geoscience education, there are not recognized best practices for the producing, testing and refining such videos. This uncertainty largely reflects a lack of clarity as to the target audience (i.e., upper division undergrads? lower division undergrads? The public?) and matching the content and associated cognitive load of video content to said audience. A way to save time on video development and ensure the effectiveness of produced videos is to recognize and better understand the most effective design strategies for geoscience educational videos, so as to use these as frameworks to increase the effectiveness of geoscientific video products.

In 2016 we established Geoscience Studios (GSS) at UT Dallas. Over the past several years, with NSF support, UTD GSS has created some 25 geoscience educational videos in various formats on a range of topics. In partnership with USF, we are assessing a subset of these products for use in undergraduate classrooms. Our video design experience plus information from cognitive psychology and educational research on multimedia learning have allowed us to get some useful insights on designing geoscience educational videos. We will provide detail on several approaches to these challenges, such as design solutions for presenting spatial information and deep time, and we will highlight the relevant theoretical basis behind these solutions. One of our most popular videos is focused on the origins of the Permian Basin (https://youtu.be/zksQ89aPigE; 9500 views on YouTube in 2 years) and we have assessed its educational impacts and effectiveness in multiple classrooms. We will discuss the “lessons learned” from our assessment results on this video along with how design solutions were applied in its refinement.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 52, No. 1

doi: 10.1130/abs/2020SC-342715

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