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.

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 ;-)

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. 

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.

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!

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

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.

Thank you! Prof. Lumley! Appreciate it. 

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.

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.

Perfect! Thanks a lot! Just the resource that I want to learn more! thanks a lot, Jamie

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.

That's so great that y'all have a course for this!

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.

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.

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!

One more to add: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/TESTA/

Great!! Thanks, Shane