Evaluating the introduction of unmanned Aerial Vehicles for teaching and learning in geoscience fieldwork education

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become more accessible for use in civil roles such as scientific research. Despite their increasing use in research, there has been little investigation of their potential use as an educational tool in Geoscience. This small-scale mixed methods research investigated the potential benefits and challenges of using UAVs in fieldwork at two North West of England Universities. UAVs have shown to have the potential to be a useful tool for use in Geoscience fieldwork by offering students many learning benefits such as; providing different perspectives of a landscape, the ability to collect data from inaccessible locations and to enhance student data collection skills. However, there are substantial barriers to introducing UAVs in fieldwork such as laws and licencing, privacy, time, cost and a lack of students being allowed to fly the aircraft legally.

KEYWORDS:

• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
• UAV
• fieldwork
• mobile technology
• mobile technology enhanced learning
• learning

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my Director of Studies Dr Fran Tracy and my second supervisor Professor Tim Stott for their guidance and support throughout this research. I would also like to thank both lecturers and students who took their time to be a part of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Work supported as part of a PhD Scholarship at Liverpool John Moores University