| Project Title | Immersive, multimodal and interactive modules in Geography courses |
| Principal Investigator | Siobhán McPhee |
| Co-Applicant | Nina Hewitt, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Geography |
| Faculty | Arts |
| Funding Year | 2021 |
| Project Summary | The project aims to develop a total of 15 modules of interactive digital content across four geography courses, and is directly correlated with UBC’s core area of Transformative Learning, initiated in the most recent strategic plan. There will be: 4 Modules GEOB 102 (Our Changing Environment: Climate and Ecosystems), including virtual field trips, interactive instructional materials formative assessment activities, and will mainly use Tapestry, H5P and Google Earth Web. 4 modules will be developed for GEOG 257 (People, Places & Landscapes), including 3 podcasts, 3 short-documentary videos, a set of 14 reflection exercises with interactive questions, and textual content using a blend of the H5P and Tapestry Tool platforms, as well as one interactive cartographic storytelling fieldtrip using ArcGIS StoryMaps 5 modules for GEOG 374 (Statistics in Geography) including lab activities in Jupyter notebooks and other interactive activities that draw on existing open-source text book lessons and activities (e.g., Illowsky and Dean in OpenStax; Lane (Rice U OER at: http://onlinestatbook.com/2/index.html ), and resources on UBC’s Statspace. Content will be delivered with H5P, and downloadable Jupyter notebooks (which will run in UBC’s online Jupyter Hub at ubc.syzygy.ca), and Github. 2 modules for GEOG 357 (Society, Culture & Space) including 2 podcasts, and 3 short interactive videos hosted in ArcGIS StoryMaps and Tapestry relating to real-life study-cases with community partners in collaboration with CBEL and ORICE at UBC. This project addresses a gap in open source educational resources in geography, by designing interactive- based pedagogical practices that increase students’ acess to knowledge and engagement (Graham, 2005). Drawing from a blended learning perspective, Ross and Gage (2005) predict, the future direction for blended learning systems will be differentiated based on how to blend rather than if they blend or not. The digital content centres students in its design by utilizing evidence-based pedagogies that perceive students as active learners ensuring that content and delivery methods are relevant to student’s lives after they graduate. The online platforms utilized will depend on the specific curricular and pedagogical requirements of each course. All these platforms and plug-ins are either free or available for UBC students and professors to access. Our project leads all have previous experience with these platforms. The content in these modules can be used in any higher-level geography course, but is also applicable to other social and natural sciences such as anthropology, sociology, the earth, atmospheric and environmental sciences, as well as any introductory statistics course that aim to engage with digital immersive storytelling pedagogies. |
| Grant type | OER Implementation |
| Funded Amount | $24,696.00 |
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