Fieldwork is central to the culture, practices and pedagogy of geography, earth and environmental sciences, and many other disciplines, including biosciences, built environment, religious studies and the social sciences. It can be defined, in the context of student learning, as “any arena or zone within a subject where supervised learning can take place via first-hand experience, outside the constraints of the four-walls classroom setting”.
The Open Fieldwork (OF) Project will identify existing open fieldwork education resources, drawing them together to allow easy discovery and reuse in the GEES and wider HE community. Such resources might include information on field sites, support and assessment material, risk assessment and other good practice for the running of fieldwork. The GEES disciplines are unique within both academia and professional practice in bringing together the social, natural and applied sciences, and the humanities. It is therefore expected that the identification and drawing together of open fieldwork resources will reduce the duplication of effort across many disciplines, and make resources available to learners, practitioners and other end users.
The OF project will:
- Bring together a collection of open fieldwork education resources
- Explore technical approaches to make fieldwork open educational resources (OER) more discoverable
- Produce guidance for the community on light touch ways to enhance discovery of open fieldwork education resources including advice on geotagging and creating metadata
- Produce guidance for the community on how to make fieldwork resources suitable for open release
- Develop a community of practice around open fieldwork resources
For more information on the Open Fieldwork (OF) Project please visit the project blogsite at http://openfieldwork.org.uk/ or contact the TEL team at: tel@plymouth.ac.uk