Inquiry-Based Learning in Remote Sensing: A Space Balloon Educational Experiment

Abstract

Teaching remote sensing in higher education has been traditionally restricted in lecture and computer-aided laboratory activities. This paper presents and evaluates an engaging inquiry-based educational experiment. The experiment was incorporated in an introductory remote sensing undergraduate course to bridge the gap between theory and application of relevant technology. During this semester-long experiment, titled 'ESF goes to space', students designed, built, launched and successfully acquired imagery from the upper stratospheric parts (approximately 27 000 m). Replication guidelines are presented and a post-evaluation discusses benefits and limitations for students, instructors and university.

How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge?

“…However, for particular students completing particular dissertations they are not generic because all of these processes involve engaging with particular forms of disciplinary and professional knowledge that mean that these processes involve different practices and ways of thinking in different disciplinary and professional settings (McCune and Entwistle 2011;McCune and Hounsell 2005). While some research into research-based learning has begun to foreground the forms of knowledge that students develop through inquiry-based learning (Levy and Petrulis 2012) and there are many examples of studies of inquiry-based learning that are focused on particular forms of disciplinary knowledge (for example, in Geography see Spronken-Smith et al 2008;Mountrakis and Triantakonstantis 2012), studies of dissertations have not examined how students' understandings of their disciplines are affected by the work of completing a dissertation. In this conceptualisation of dissertation completion, students bring together their understanding of the ways of thinking in their disciplines and particular research methods.…”

An Assessment of Educational Benefits from the OpenOrbiter Space Program

“…Students collect information, assess the nature of the challenge or problem and devise and implement a plan to achieve the assigned goal or resolve the assigned problem. The utility of PBL techniques has been demonstrated for all stages of education ranging from primary to university-level (see [1][2][3][4][5][6]). The use of PBL has also been favorably assessed in numerous disciplines such as computer science [7,8], computer engineering [9], electrical engineering [10,11], mechanical engineering [12][13][14], aerospace engineering [15,16], management [17] and marketing [18]).…”

GEN_MAT: A MATLAB‐based map generalization algorithm toolbox

“…In geography education, students actively learn through field studies, laboratory experiments, and practical work (Healey, ). Practice may be supported by learning tools, for example, a space balloon sensing system involving design, construction, launch and retrieval in a remote sensing educational experiment (Mountrakis & Triantakonstantis, ) or MobiTOP (Mobile Tagging of Objects and People), a geospatial digital library system that allows users to contribute and share multimedia annotations via mobile devices, within a geographical field inquiry (Chang et al, ). Students often use Google Earth and other tools to assist their active learning of concepts about geographic information systems (Srivastava & Tait, ).…”