The research, led by Rafael K. Horota of the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and the University of Bergen, together with colleagues Christian H. Eide, Kim Senger, Marius O. Jonassen, and Marie A. Vander Kloet, surveyed 66 students enrolled in bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD-level Arctic geology and geophysics courses. The team framed their investigation around two questions: how students perceive the usefulness of digital field representations in their learning, and how these tools help manage what education researchers call the novelty space, the cognitive and emotional burden of encountering an unfamiliar environment for the first time.

The technology at the heart of the study is part of the Svalbox initiative, an effort begun at UNIS in 2017 to systematically digitise Arctic outcrops. VR Svalbard, launched in 2021, weaves together drone-based photogrammetry, 360-degree photospheres, map layers, and three-dimensional terrain data into Virtual Field Guides and Virtual Field Tours. Students can rotate around digital outcrop models, measure bed orientations, trace structural features, and zoom seamlessly between landscape-scale overviews and centimetre-scale detail, all from a browser. The platform currently offers six Virtual Field Guides and 175 Virtual Field Tours covering Svalbard’s remarkably diverse terrain, from sedimentary basins to traces of ancient mountain-building events, glaciations, and magmatic activity.

To evaluate how students responded, the researchers combined the Technology Acceptance Model, a well-established framework for measuring whether people find a tool useful and easy to use, with pre-field and post-field questionnaires built around Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory. That theory describes learning as a four-stage cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation. In field education, these stages traditionally unfold as in-situ observation, interpretation, and iterative testing of geological ideas. The study asked whether virtual tools could scaffold each stage before, during, and after physical excursions.

The results were striking. Of the surveyed students, 86 percent had used the platform at least once, 71 percent during field preparation lectures, and 55 percent in post-fieldwork exercises. Perhaps most tellingly, 53 percent explored the platform independently out of personal curiosity, and more than half engaged with it beyond their scheduled class time. Students also used it to plan their own fieldwork, revisit specific localities, and extract visual data for assignments. On the acceptance measures, items such as using VR Svalbard would enhance my effectiveness in the field scored a mean of 6.0 on a seven-point scale, while ease-of-use statements scored around 5.9, indicating that the tool was intuitive enough that technological friction did not eat into cognitive resources needed for geological reasoning.

The educational impact data suggest the virtual previews did exactly what experiential learning theory would predict. Before excursions, students rated the statement that visiting field localities virtually made the excursion more interesting at a mean of 4.0 on a five-point scale, and geographic orientation benefits scored 4.1. A total of 83 percent agreed or fully agreed that the virtual experiences improved their geographic orientation, and 85 percent positively evaluated the multi-scale integration of GIS maps and aerial imagery. After fieldwork, students reported that revisiting sites digitally helped them consolidate observations, with 75 percent saying the virtual visits contributed to their preparedness and 82 percent saying that virtually visiting additional localities complemented their learning. Students felt better prepared overall, with a mean score of 4.1 for post-field revisiting.

Some of the most vivid evidence came from students’ own words. One noted that seeing a site in its summer condition helped them understand what lay beneath the snow they encountered in the field. Another observed that their class had only seen 10 percent of an outcrop during a spring excursion, while VR Svalbard revealed the rest. These comments capture a key advantage of digital representations in the Arctic: seasonal snow cover, limited daylight, weather windows, and logistical constraints mean that physical access to outcrops is often partial and fleeting, whereas a digital model can be revisited indefinitely, in any season, at any scale.

Crucially, the students did not view the technology as a substitute for the real thing. Support for partially replacing fieldwork scored a lukewarm mean of 3.0, and most participants explicitly rejected the idea that virtual experiences could stand in for physical fieldwork. Instead, they positioned the tools as complements: instruments for preparation, aids for reflection, resources for revisiting inaccessible features, and extensions of spatial visualisation. Within the novelty space framework, the researchers argue that virtual previews calibrate rather than eliminate novelty, allowing students to arrive in the field with preliminary mental models already formed, so that limited and expensive field time can be devoted to observation and interpretation rather than situational adjustment.

The study also carries broader implications for equity and sustainability in geoscience education. Fieldwork has long been criticised for excluding people with disabilities, for costs that burden students and institutions, particularly in the global south, and for a disciplinary culture that has historically privileged masculine displays of physical competence while leaving safety concerns around gender, sexuality, and race inadequately addressed. Virtual field experiences cannot dissolve these structural problems, but the authors argue they can widen participation, offer guaranteed access to sites in daylight and good visibility, and function partly like preparatory guides that reduce anxiety for students, including neurodivergent students, facing unfamiliar environments. There is a carbon dimension as well: as scrutiny of air travel intensifies, digital extensions of field learning offer a way to balance experiential depth with ecological responsibility.

The economics are surprisingly favourable. The researchers report that developing the online platforms cost roughly 10,000 euros in total, with about 1,000 euros per year for web hosting, while consumer drones such as the DJI Mavic series used for data acquisition cost around 2,000 euros each. The expensive part is Arctic fieldwork itself, which is precisely why the team recommends opportunistically capturing photospheres and digital outcrop models during courses and research campaigns that are already running. At UNIS, where educating one student-year costs about 10,000 euros and individual courses operate on budgets of 30,000 to 50,000 euros, the authors conclude that virtual field experiences are not a luxury but a necessity. For institutions elsewhere, the moderate resource requirements should make adoption straightforward. The researchers caution that their findings rest on self-reported perceptions within a single institutional context, and they call for future work measuring actual learning gains, explicitly quantifying cognitive load, and co-designing the tools with students and educators. But the message from the edge of the Arctic is clear: when thoughtfully integrated, digital field representations do not dilute the field experience. They extend it across time, space, and circumstance, making one of science education’s most powerful traditions available to more students than ever before.

Subject of Research: Virtual field experiences in High Arctic geoscience field education

Article Title: Digital field representations as a holistic approach to experiential learning in High Arctic geoscience field education

Article References: Digital field representations as a holistic approach to experiential learning in High Arctic geoscience field education. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-311-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-311-2026

Keywords: virtual field experiences, geoscience education, Svalbard, experiential learning, VR Svalbard, fieldwork, photogrammetry, novelty space, Technology Acceptance Model, inclusivity, Arctic, UNIS