NSF Awards: 1712495
In the Spring of 2020, the COVID pandemic hit the US hard. Many geoscience classes had to quickly change from in-person to online teaching with very little preparation. UTD Geoscience Studios has been growing slowly since we started in 2016 to make short (3-10 min.) videos about a variety of geoscience topics. Much of this growth was rooted in an NSF-IUSE Level 1 project called ‘Geoscience Animation: Construction, Evaluation, and Modification of Plate Tectonic Concepts for Geoscience Education’. UTD-GSS is now making 20-30 videos per year, which can be viewed on our YouTube channel. Our viewer demographic is 53% 18 – 34 years old. It quickly became apparent that some of our videos were being used by other instructors for their on-line Geoscience courses. In this video, we will explore the difficulties that geoscience educators and students faced with online geoscience teaching. Then, we will talk about how the UTD GSS team stepped up our efforts to generate, assess, and share our animations, videos, and digital models. We will also discuss our efforts to engage broader audiences, delivering science-accurate geoscience content to the public and middle school students at the same time that we continue to provide more high-quality free geoscience educational videos for geoscience majors.
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Welcome to our page! Thank you for being interested in our research. Our research aims to understand how to better design science-accurate Earth Science videos for formal and informal education of all levels. The current projects include: Plate tectonics video series for middle school and for undergraduate education, Geonews Project, and Google Earth based Geoscience Educational Videos (GEGVL).
Videos and project pages can be found in UTD Geoscience Studio website: https://utdgss2016.wixsite.com/utdgss
You can also check our YouTube webpage to watch the videos:
UTD Geoscience Studio (UTD GSS) YouTube Channel
Shane Woods
Robert Stern
Ning Wang
Robert Stern
Professor
We need to build the community of professors and students who want to make, share, and evaluate videos about their science! How best to do that?
Ning Wang
Daniel Zietlow
Agreed! Another idea would be to have dedicated science communication specialists actually within different university departments that can undertake these projects. Or partner with science organizations that have science communication teams that could be written into grants. I'm fortunate enough to find myself in that situation, currently.
Robert Stern
Professor
Yes but that is a challenge for small departments like ours. We have 7 T/TT faculty, will have 5 at the end of summer. We are a like a band of guerillas, eating rice and beans. NCAR is like a well-staffed army ;-)
Daniel Zietlow
Solid point! I do work outside of NCAR, too, and it is sooo difficult to find funding for science videos! I attended a talk the other week about a biology professor mentoring and partnering with students in the art department (for illustrations, for example). I know the students wouldn't have the geoscience background, but maybe that is a route that could be explored.
Robert Stern
Professor
We started with art students but they can't conceptualize geoscientific processes. we have had good luck with art students who have a geoscience minor. But if students have no bkgd in geoscience they likely don't have any interest. better to work with geoscience majors, they are fully engaged with their projects.
Kimberly Arcand
Is there any opportunity to pair up art students with Geoscience majors? Artists are often very interested in science when it is presented well, whether or not they completely understand it, and scientists are often very interested in seeing their data or concepts presented in a compelling, visual, storytelling format. The rest of the world falls somewhere in the spectrum and can benefit from an artist's take on real science. Win, win!
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Oh yeah, Kim, btw, you guys did great work with AR. Actually, yes. In the past few years, we had some students with an art background or art majors joined our class and worked with us as a team. But most of them are also with geoscience background as minor major or past training as well. We also try to figure out a way to improve such cooperation and mutual learning, like you said, win win! So far, what we can do is to expose ourselves to our Art department and still try to highlight the value of our work for Earth science community and art community. Just like you mentioned! Thanks again
Folashade Solomon
Senior Researcher
This is an important project. The images in the video are compelling. Can you share some of your initial successes and challenges to this work?
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Hi Folashade, thank you for your kind words and the interesting question! So we have already published 2 papers and there is 2 paper about Geonews project and Place-based video design are under review. The GEGVL beta version is available here: https://utdgss2016.wixsite.com/utdgss/gegvl We are writing a paper reporting the preliminary results of GEGVL.
The plate tectonics series for middle school is also in progress, we have already finished 3 videos, there are probably 6 videos in the series. We will assess them and then release them to everyone. We will write a paper about middle school once we got the data.
The major difficulty is to find students who want to take the training in video design and creation and keep working with us. Since the students need to have geoscience background and would like to contribute to our video-making and educational research. Geoscience education research (GER) as a part of DBER (discipline-based education research) is pretty small and most geoscience majors do not know about GER so I guess we have to market our work hard. Another challenge is the video itself is very complex, with different goals, methods, audience, environment, usage, and types, and Earth science as a very complex and interdisciplinary subject making video design for Earth science education pretty hard to have a unified design framework. The current cognitive design principle is not enough for discipline-based video design, so we are still working on the very basic theories of design.
Shane Woods
Folashade Solomon
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Also, from the assessment perspective, most past assessments are neither real-time nor qualitative enough. Working with computer science and electronic engineers, we are trying to create a new assessment method for individual learners in the video learning process. Although growing faster and faster recent years, there some basic theories missing from behavioral, cognitive, design as well as tech domains, so we are working on both technical and theoretical parts, which is time-consuming and challenging
Ning Wang
Robert Stern
Professor
Thanks! As the faculty member leading the UTD effort, I see 3 big challenges: One is recruiting and training talented undergraduates and retaining them to do graduate studies. As you can imagine, students get better with time, so the longer we have them and the more videos they make, the better they get. A second challenge is funding; NSF DUE is the natural source. Our IUSE Level I proposal was funded after 2 tries but twice our Level II proposal has been declined. We will try one more time. It seems that this new form of reaching and teaching is not understood or appreciated by reviewers and panel, even though assessment is always a strong part of our proposals. Funding is critical to the viability of this effort, it is easier to attract talent if you pay them. The third challenge is dissemination; there is no natural outlet to the targeted audience. We can disseminate to scientific user forums like AAAS, GSA, AGU, and Sigma Xi but these tend to be more senior people. We know that some of these reach the classroom, where they are used as supplementary materials. Our Youtube channel "UTD GSS" is slowly growing, with 2000 subscribers and 215,000 views since 2016.
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Oh yeah! Also, I think that videos, as the most fundamental and popular format of multimedia education tools, contain most of the educational knowledge and multimedia educational designs. The development of videos will directly increase the educational effectiveness of AR, VR, or MX platforms in the long run.
Ning Wang
Prof Lumley
Ning, Ali, Bob et al.,
All the best, David
Prof David Lumley | david.lumley@utdallas.edu Professor | Cecil and Ida Green Endowed Chair in Geophysics | Director, Seismic Imaging & Inversion Lab Geophysics | Physics | School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics | University of Texas at Dallas https://profiles.utdallas.edu/david.lumley Life Member, www.AGU.org Life Member, Board of Directors, www.SEG.orgNing Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Thank you! Prof. Lumley! Appreciate it.
Prof Lumley
Ning, Ali, Bob et al.,
All the best, David
Prof David Lumley | david.lumley@utdallas.edu Professor | Cecil and Ida Green Endowed Chair in Geophysics | Director, Seismic Imaging & Inversion Lab Geophysics | Physics | School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics | University of Texas at Dallas https://profiles.utdallas.edu/david.lumley Life Member, www.AGU.org Life Member, Board of Directors, www.SEG.orgNing Wang
Jamie Bell
Project Director
Thank you for this presentation that clearly presents the problem space you are seeking to address and provides examples of your innovative approaches. You mentioned eye tracking as one evaluation strategy you are using to measure impact. How has data or input informed your design process so far?
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Thanks a lot! Jamie. Regarding eye tracking, we are still in data collecting and program training stage. Most of the work in the past three years are creating software that use webcam to estimate attention, design experiment, create videos, and collect data to train the AI program. So we just start analyze data recently, the only thing we found so far is that simply analyze where they are looking at is not very promising, and maybe for some particular objects, such as figures, maps or tables, naive and experienced learners will have different pattern of seeing. Mostly we are working on analyzing face movement and their video learning engagement on each topics and designs in the video.
Jamie Bell
Project Director
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, Ning. Indeed each of these methodologies has particular challenges and are often part of a suite of tools that one needs to use to understand engagement. I might suggest that you explore some video interview vignettes from CAISE, where a range of researchers share a little bit about their approaches to measuring engagement.
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Perfect! Thanks a lot! Just the resource that I want to learn more! thanks a lot, Jamie
Jamie Bell
Daniel Zietlow
Great work! What type of science communication training and technical filmmaking training do you all give your geoscience students to undertake the video production? Has there been an education impact on the students tasked with creating the videos?
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Thanks a lot! Daniel. So we gave an undergraduate course called Geoscience Videos and Animations at UT Dallas in the spring. Normally we have about 5-7 students signed up. They will have Adobe software training, from Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects. How to do storyboarding, research and create materials. They also learn to use DSLR, setup lights, audio recording and basic film knowledge as well as some drones. Depending on the semester, we sometimes taugth them something about psychology, computer simulation and 3D modeling (like Maya). The science communication training is not so much, only one course about cognitive theories of multimedia, and more about how to research and write narrative.
Ning Wang
Daniel Zietlow
That's so great that y'all have a course for this!
Ning Wang
Robert Stern
Professor
Thanks! But I don't think there's any other way to do it. The challenge is that undergrad Geosci student's classes are crowded and few have room for an elective like this. At UTD, undergrad courses need to have 5 students to "make" and that is too big for this class. Fortunately I don't need the workload credit and I have some excellent grad students like Ning to do the heavy lifting.
Ning Wang
Daniel Zietlow
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Thanks! Dr. Stern. We are very fortunate to have one or two students every time willing to continuously work with us after each Geoscience Videos and Animations. We should consider if it is possible to make a way to make it more efficient for a bigger size of students by cooperation or become a section of some other upper-level undergrad geoscience classes. Because our course is research-based anyway.
Robert Stern
Professor
Very little science communication is provided at the undergrad level, they are learning nuts and bolts. We do stress that they need to know their audience, don't use jargon for the public. If students go on for graduate work, they engage much more with science education literature. As for educational impact on the student creators, it is great but so far we haven't tried to assess it.
Ning Wang
Daniel Zietlow
James Callahan
We were very much looking forward to programs like yours. One that regularly produces excellent STEM based videos. Thanks to your team's work, we are assured to not be disappointed in the least with this year's abundant crop of Showcase videos. Your thoughtful work is producing such a rich array of wonderful video shorts.
Noting that you even have a playlist on music. Plus a playlist of excellent STEM videos produced by others. You are clearly creating professional, moving and beautiful videos; considering all the elements.
It's so important to learn from one another. Of course, we have now subscribed to your channel! Your wonderful Youtube Channel is a fantastic collection to learn from:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGRcGfZpcWMCih...
Naturally, one video we have paid particular attention to. Certainly one we can and will recommend:
CO2 Drawdown -- Where Should the Water go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv-n54NTd9M
Thank you, from our team at the Climate Science Demonstrations Youtube Channel (a program of ClimateChangeEducation.org):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqFObPDn5SR4VR...
Also expressing our thanks as members of the CLEAN Network, and CLEAN the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network Cleannet.org
Ning Wang
Robert Stern
Professor
Thanks for the kind words! The CO2 drawdown video was inspired by the work of Prof. Allen Hunt and his research group at Wright State U. We like working with experts in other disciplines. And thanks for subscribing to our YouTube channel!
Ning Wang
Shane Woods
Senior Director, STEM Center of Excellence
You have built a resource that speaks to a broad audience including secondary science teachers. Share how you introduce your repository to teachers. Is it through regional and national science associations, conferences or meeting with local school districts?
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Thank you for the question and feedback! Shane. Yes, so far we have been sharing our research and materials via STAT CAST annual and CAST-mini meetings. We also worked with the Department of Science/Mathematics Education at UT Dallas, their head Prof. Mary Urquhart is in our research team and they have helped us disseminate the info too. However, we do need more ways to spread our works. We are considering presenting at the coming NAGT and NSTA meetings. Any other ideas? Thank you so much!
Shane Woods
Shane Woods
Senior Director, STEM Center of Excellence
One more to add: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/TESTA/
Ning Wang
Ning Wang
PhD Student
Great!! Thanks, Shane