Environmental Visualization Objects

Students› understanding of complex concepts and systems in the environmental sciences often suffers as a result of the inefficiency of conventional teaching. Recent research suggests that interactive environmental visualization objects (EVOs) can help students understand complex matters. The objective of this project is to produce a variety of EVOs that help students achieve a detailed and accurate understanding of important environmental concepts and system processes. As blended-learning units, the EVOs expose 3D animated interactive content that visualizes processes and system behaviour semi-realistically. Via pre-rendered videoclips and Adobe Flash user interfaces, students will be able to change parameters or move in space or time, and then explore the ensuing changes. The project supports five different courses and lectures in ecology, atmospheric science and earth science that are visited by 25 to 300 bachelor or master students. In these courses, basic and advanced EVOs will be used (and evaluated) that expose different subsets of the whole content complexity and use different instructional scaffolding (adaptive teaching approach). The evaluation results will reveal to what degree (i) a student¿s understanding is improved by using EVOs, (ii) the efficiency of EVOs depends on student training level, and (iii) adaptive instructional scaffolding is important. The EVOs will be established permanently via the content management system of Mobility Matters and by training non-specialists to develop them further.

The EVOs, discussions within the EVO team, interviews with the lecturers involved in courses using
the EVOs and the evaluations by the students revealed that:
• EVOs provide a versatile learning environment with benefits that cannot be achieved with
textbooks and classic lectures. EVOs help students attain a fundamental and systematic
understanding, allowing lecturers to focus on modeling complex systems and problem
solutions in later discussions with the students.
• It was perceived that EVOs contributed significantly to improving systematic thinking and
deeper knowledge, and facilitated knowledge transfer of students to research fields that are
new for them.
• It was also perceived that by their nature of being visual modeling tools, EVOs help students
develop problem solving strategies and cope with scientific uncertainties.

The great majority of the students regarded working with EVOs as valuable for learning the targeted
concepts, provided there was sufficient time and the instructions were clear. Most importantly, about
90% of the students reported that working with the EVO helped them to improve their understanding
of complex relationships in natural systems (to some extent at least).
Further, the students profited in that
• they made special, memorizable experiences with the new teaching technology.
• EVOs enabled them to “work in four dimensions” (space and time).
• they could move back and forth between scientific abstraction and system observation.
• they realized that data and results in science may be ambivalent.

The lecturers profited in various ways from using EVOs in their teaching, including:
• that they could skip rather boring introductions to system processes
• that students grasp concepts at their own pace that weren’t understood satisfactorily by all of
them in previous lectures
• that new research findings can efficiently be included in teaching by modifying existing EVOs
• that they realized that EVOs can be used in completely different teaching contexts to form a
structured teaching platform
• that they have become aware how their teaching can take a new, promising route

• EVO generic concept