Virtual Field Trips Get an Inquiry Makeover for Geoscience Classrooms

Virtual field trips have become one of the most talked-about tools in geoscience education, promising students the chance to stand beneath chalk cliffs or wander through a limestone quarry without leaving the classroom. Yet a persistent criticism has shadowed these digital excursions: too often they are little more than guided tours, in which students passively follow a predetermined route laid out by the developer. A team of Danish and New Zealand researchers now argues that virtual fieldwork can be far more than a spectacle, provided it is built around a carefully structured inquiry lesson. In a short GC Insights paper published in the journal Geoscience Communication, Rie Hjørnegaard Malm of the University of Southern Denmark and her colleagues describe how they combined immersive 360-degree videos with the principles of inquiry-based learning to create a virtual fieldwork module for upper secondary students, one in which learners collect their own data, form their own hypotheses, and argue their way toward geologically sound conclusions.

The team’s starting point was a long-standing tension in field teaching. Fieldwork sits at the heart of Earth science, and decades of research confirm that taking students into the field connects materials and processes, makes theoretical knowledge relevant, and deepens understanding of key scientific principles. But as the researchers point out, the open exploration that drives scientific fieldwork is rarely reproduced in teaching. Most field trips follow a linear, pre-designed structure that moves students through selected locations or outcrops, a format that, according to earlier work by Frederick Granshaw and Don Duggan-Haas, lacks the fundamental exploratory nature of real research. The same constraint applies with even greater force in virtual environments, where the developer decides in advance what content students will encounter. The challenge the team set themselves was to design a virtual field experience in which the student’s actual task is to explore, gather data, and generate hypotheses rather than simply absorb a narrated story.

Their answer draws on a pedagogical tradition that stretches back more than a century. Inquiry-based learning, formalised in science education during the 1980s as the 5E model, sequences lessons through the phases of Engage, Explore, Explain, Expand, and Evaluate, placing students’ own explorations at the centre of instruction. The intellectual roots go back to John Dewey’s 1933 description of the five phases of reflective thinking, which later inspired problem-based learning and learning cycle models. The researchers added a further phase, Elicit, introduced by Arthur Eisenkraft in 2003, which engages students and maps their prior knowledge before exploration begins. In their design, the lesson opens with open-ended questions that surface what students already believe, then hands them the virtual environment and lets them investigate freely. The authors note that while research on inquiry does not yield definitive results because of the complex character of learning science, there is now broad acceptance within science education that inquiry fosters both learning and engagement.

The virtual fieldwork module itself is aimed at Danish upper secondary students aged 16 to 19 enrolled in an elective Physical Geography course, and it can run as a single 90-minute session or as two, depending on students’ prior experience with inquiry and virtual environments. The learning goals are ambitious: students should be able to observe and distinguish three field localities, classify their rocks and fossils, determine their relative ages, and use that information to infer past environments and geological time. The three localities are Møns Klint, Stevns Klint, and Faxe Kalkbrud, Danish sites that together represent connected but distinct geological periods around the end of the Cretaceous, spanning the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, when a severe mass extinction transformed life on Earth 66 million years ago. The lesson culminates with students using their knowledge of past mass extinctions, geological deposits, and environmental change to predict what geological deposits from our own era might look like in the far future, linking deep-time climate change to the present crisis.

Technically, the environment is built from 360-degree video recordings modified with the software platform Thinglink, an approach that keeps production costs low while preserving the sense of standing in a real landscape. One of the team’s most interesting design choices involves scale. Into the 360-degree videos they embedded both microfossils and macrofossils, allowing students to explore across multiple scales simultaneously. This proved challenging for the students, but the researchers argue both scales are essential: the fossils establish a link between two distinguishable environments, and that link is one of the indicators of environmental change that students must work out to solve the geological puzzle. The ability to move safely and easily across large virtual distances and across scales is, as the authors note in their discussion, one of the genuine advantages virtual environments hold over physical fieldwork, and here it is put to work in service of genuine scientific reasoning rather than mere sightseeing.

The lesson’s structure follows an eight-part inquiry cycle that the researchers present as a diagram: Elicit, Engage, Explore, Explain I, Explain II, Extend I, Extend II, and a continuous Feedback loop running through the middle of the activity. The cyclic design deliberately emulates the practice of science, using the outcomes of one exploration to engage students in the next inquiry cycle. The authors emphasise that this communicates an important message about how science works: finding an answer is not the end of a scientific investigation but a possible motivation to continue exploring. Feedback sits at the centre of the design because both students and the teacher give and receive it throughout the activity, supporting formative assessment at every stage rather than confining evaluation to a final test.

Two phases of the cycle carry particular weight in the team’s analysis. The Explain stages are critical for scaffolding knowledge, helping students approach questions such as how the fossil record translates into time and geological history, and how different physical sites can be compared and contrasted. During both real fieldwork and this exercise, the researchers expect this scaffolding to emerge as students ask questions of one another and of their teachers. Peer learning, they note, is an important component of fieldwork in nature, and in the virtual version it is essential for communicating and connecting specific knowledge from the three localities into the shared geological story assembled in the classroom. The Extend activities then push students toward the higher levels of Bloom’s revised taxonomy, where knowledge can be interpreted and applied rather than merely recalled, with teacher prompts playing the same guiding role they do in the field.

The researchers are candid about the broader lesson their design effort carries for the field. As they recount, Glenn Dolphin and colleagues found in 2019 that when geoscientists, computer scientists, and psychologists embraced virtual reality to mitigate the problem of large student populations, they instead uncovered a fundamental pedagogical problem: how geology itself is taught. Dolphin’s team proposed teaching geology with more emphasis on how geology works, so that students better understand the relationship between inference and observation in fieldwork. That emphasis is precisely what inquiry-based learning is built to deliver, and it is what the new module attempts in digital form. The authors also suggest that the virtual tasks can be extended into a laboratory or workshop classroom setting, and that the engaging fossil-hunting experience can motivate students to consider authentic contemporary problems, including the sixth mass extinction event that scientists warn is now underway.

The team’s conclusion is cautiously optimistic. Building an inquiry lesson with a virtual reality component, they write, challenged the format without letting it collapse into a show-and-tell exercise. The motivation generated by the rich digital 360-degree environment, combined with the goal of mapping a genuine geological problem, carries students beyond simply wanting a correct answer. Instead, the design acknowledges and uses students’ own answers, on which the teacher then builds toward what scientists actually think, offering students the reward of figuring out a reasonable explanation for a scientific problem and having their thinking recognised. For a field still grappling with how to integrate virtual fieldwork with inquiry at the secondary level, the module offers a concrete, freely available template. The complete lesson materials have been deposited on Zenodo, allowing other teachers to test whether a carefully designed virtual world can do what the best field trips have always promised: turn students from spectators into investigators.

Subject of Research: Inquiry-based virtual fieldwork design for upper secondary geoscience education using 360-degree videos

Article Title: GC Insights: Designing for inquiry in virtual fieldwork

Article References: Malm, R. H., Hansen, K. R. S., Evans, R., Madsen, L. M., Milán, J., Thibaut, N., & Kennedy, B. (2026). GC Insights: Designing for inquiry in virtual fieldwork. Geoscience Communication, 9(2), 139-144. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-139-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-139-2026

Keywords: virtual fieldwork, inquiry-based learning, geoscience education, 360-degree video, 5E model, Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, mass extinction, upper secondary education, Thinglink, Denmark, climate change education, Geoscience Communication