Green Gown Awards 2021: Enterprise - Durham University - Winner

Field-trips for future

Project RENU (Research Expedition for Net Zero and Universal Leaning) is in collaboration with Earth Minutes, a youth-led environmental communications service grounded in science, and Durham University. Since the Coronavirus outbreak, we recognised that many University courses have been largely digitalised and the majority of Geography field-trips have been cancelled or postponed. This unearthed many challenges related to traditional field-trips, including the accessibility (i.e. physically and financially) and sustainability (i.e. carbon footprint) of field-trips. We used this as an opportunity to drive the future of field-trips through trialling a digital field-trip experience for the second-year module, ‘Glaciers and Glaciation’, within the geography (BSc) degree.

Through using cutting-edge communication techniques (i.e. 360-video) whilst following sustainable digital practices, we aim to assist Higher Educational institutions to make environmental learning accessible to all students and to provide students with the sufficient tools to learn about the environment in a fundamentally sustainable way.

Top 3 learnings:

1. There is a significant student demand to make field-trips more accessible and sustainable.
2. Digitalised field-trip experiences can be most effective as an alternative to traditional field-trips when used alongside local-based research. 
3. Digitalised field-trip experiences can be subsequently utilised to enhance students’ scientific communication skills.

Videos

• Video #1 (click to hide)