Workflow for designing instructional videos to support place-based geoscience education for geoscience majors

Abstract

Geographic context is important for Earth Science education but different places have different geological complexities and effectively establishing geoscientific context can be difficult. Well-designed videos can help geoscience educators introduce geologically significant places to undergraduate geoscience students. However, there is no established framework to guide geoscientists who want to create instructional videos for place-based geoscience education. In this commentary, we share a framework including writing a narrative and generating visual materials as well as considering key psychological principles and universal design elements to improve geoscience video effectiveness. The design framework was created based on the place-based education framework, salient elements of cognitive theory of multimedia learning, and the framework of motivational design. More design recommendations were given by summarizing our experience of making and assessing a 6-minute geosicence video about the Permian Basin of W. Texas and SE New Mexico and other best practice of making the same type of videos in peer reviewed articles. We find that well-designed geoscience videos can improve geoscience majors’ knowledge about local geology and understanding of connections between place and people. The generalized video-making workflow and design recommendations can help geoscientists make their own geoscientific videos for undergraduates.

Keywords:

• Instructional multimedia design
• Earth Science Videos
• place-based education
• domain-based instructional video
• geoscience education

Acknowledgments

We thank all the reviewers and editors of Journal of Geoscience Education who commented on five earlier versions of this manuscript. Your feedback was extremely valuable for us. We thank the UTD Geoscience Studio team for help in video production. Thanks also to Prof. Mary Urquhart (UTD) for help in experiment design and insightful advice, to Prof. Jeff Ryan (USF) for helping with designing the educational evaluation, to Lochlan Vaughn for narrating the video, and to students in UT Dallas GEOS 5V08 Permian Basin Geology Class for their comments on a first draft of the video. Thanks also to Dr. William (Randy) Griffin, Jordan Newman, Dr. Ignacio Pujana, Prof. Xiangyang Xie (TCU), Dr. Mortaza Pirouz and all the students that participated in the experiment. Research involving human subjects was conducted under IRB certificate 2630778 and 19–25.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by NSF grant DUE 1712495 and GSA graduate student research grants 2019 and 2020. This is UTD Geosciences contribution number 1688.