Abstract

• The threat of recurrent disease-related disruptions to overseas field trips challenges various disciplines adopting field trip as a crucial pedagogical tool to design alternative learning activities to make up for students’ lost opportunities to learn in the field.
• Virtual field trips (VFTs) developed based on digital maps, satellite images and other forms of digital representations of the environment allow students to recover some form of immersive experience of their study sites without entailing the high costs and health risks of overseas visits.
• This project will develop three VFTs on the UK using Google Earth as the primary platform. The VFTs will be used in two geography undergraduate courses to improve students’ understanding of the local environmental details of their UK case studies.
• Internationalisation at home is achieved by engaging a UK scholar to contribute to the design of the VFTs, and by promoting learning outcomes related to the understanding of global variations in local development and planning.
• The proposed form of VFT development and application is sustainable and replicable for other sites, courses and disciplines due to its low technical threshold for VFT set-up, low budgetary requirement for development and maintenance, and ease of use by students even at home.