LEARNING MODULES TO ENCOURAGE THE SELF-ORGANIZED ACQUISITION OF SKILLS – AN INVERTED CLASSROOM CONCEPT TO PREPARE STUDENTS FOR GEOGRAPHICAL EXCURSIONS

For working and learning during geographical excursions several methods, techniques and skills are needed, e.g. measuring, polling, mapping, describing or drawing. Especially learning how to draw a complex landscape situation with a focus on indicators of landscape development usually takes a lot of time and one serious problem is that the individual learning time varies enormously from one student to another. In this paper we describe an inverted classroom concept to prepare geography students for excursions. The main aim is to foster a self-organized acquisition of relevant skills, techniques and learning strategies to explore, sharpen the view for, describe and understand landscape situations. In the first step we produced a virtual drawing course for geographers. Recordings, exercises und examples are imbedded in several learning units with topics like perspective, drawing contour lines and so on. Students work with the web-based units independently and at their own speed. Then the first drawings are discussed in class time. During the excursion students use their drawing skills as methodological and practical know-how.

The evaluation of the concept focuses on questions of how students use the learning modules and if it is possible to gain necessary skills to describe complex landscape situations visually and if individual learning preferences determines learning outcomes. We explore students’ behavior by the results of a detailed questionnaire and the Learning Style Inventory by David Kolb. As the results show, drawing techniques and strategies to describe complex landscape situations can be gained by web-based learning units in a inverted classroom scenario in a economic and time efficient way. Learning preferences have thereby an influence on learning outcomes.

We conclude that in this scenario the web-based learning units are a very good supplement to the live field trip. Time would be much to short, to gain necessary skills during the trip. Therefore the concept contributes to a qualitative better understanding of geographical phenomena. The web-based learning units can greatly increase the students' engagement outside of the classroom and thus prepare them for productive work, a sustainable understanding and real discussions by providing the possibility of a self-organized acquisition of skills before the excursion time.