ABSTRACT
Given the desire by geoscience employers for field skills and recognition of the prohibitive expense, safety concerns, and time required for effective field training, we investigated the potential for geology virtual field trips (VFT) in two presentation formats focusing on access, task accuracy, and student engagement. This chapter describes the design, development, user study results, and ethical decisions driving the creation of a geology lab VFT using both an online virtual environment presented on a monitor and an immersive virtual environment presented through a head-mounted display (HMD). The study results suggest that observation task accuracy, spatial reasoning skills, and student engagement were functionally equivalent in both formats. This approach may help to increase the diversity of the students who select geology as a career pathway by providing a safe and accessible skill building supplement to early field site training experiences.
