Introduction
Basic and applied disciplines rooted in ecology and evolution traditionally rely on experiential field instruction to teach key learning outcomes representing natural history, study design, field methods, and the process of scientific inquiry (Herman 2002, Tewksbury et al. 2014, Fleischner et al. 2017). Other disciplines, such as the geosciences, similarly rely upon field activities in instruction (Whitmeyer and Mogk 2009). Field activities, defined here as educational activities that occur outside and involve interaction with the natural or built environment (Fleischner et al. 2017), can provide unique and engaging instruction that is often vital to learning outcomes of postsecondary courses, even when they represent a relatively small portion of instruction (Harland et al. 2006). Potential impacts of reduction and elimination of field activities and natural history education from undergraduate curricula have been previously recognized (Tewksbury et al. 2014) as have potential solutions (Fleischner et al. 2017). Despite its potential importance, biology education research appears to have paid relatively little attention to postsecondary field teaching compared to classroom teaching (Singer et al. 2013) or relative to other disciplines (e.g. geography; Boyle et al. 2007).
The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly posed a unique set of challenges to higher education, and particularly to face-to-face field activities and the learning outcomes associated with them. Meeting these challenges may be hampered by a general lack of research on field pedagogy and the somewhat idiosyncratic nature of field teaching (Fleischner et al. 2017). The pandemic has highlighted an ongoing need for educational research on pedagogy in field settings (Singer et al. 2013), and immediately, for specific research focused on how instructors may be able to most effectively shift the teaching of important learning outcomes from face-to-face to remote-teaching (or distance-learning; hereafter, remote) modalities.
Rapid shifts from face-to-face modalities to remote modalities at US postsecondary institutions during spring 2020 clearly impacted field teaching activities on a large scale. I surveyed a sample of instructors of college-level courses with field components during April and May 2020 to understand these impacts. The survey was designed to answer three inductive research questions: (1) What types of activities and learning outcomes were typically taught by instructors teaching in the field? (2) How did the shift in teaching modality immediately affect instruction of learning outcomes typically taught in field settings, and what types of activities did instructors use to substitute for field activities? (3) What are the major challenges and potential solutions to effectively and inclusively teaching learning outcomes typically taught in field settings in a remote modality? Here, I report the results of this survey, and suggest several alternative approaches to remotely teaching field activities based on approaches being used by or planned by survey respondents.