In the Earth sciences, the need for virtual field experiences (VFEs) is rapidly expanding. Not only has the pandemic increased the need for VFEs for use in Earth science courses that had to be adapted for remote teaching, but ongoing accessibility challenges also necessitate the development of alternative options to in-person field experiences. Towards that end, the EPICC (Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic) TCN (Thematic Collections Network) produced a series of virtual field experiences that explore various aspects of the Astoria Formation, a Miocene-aged unit located on the scenic central Oregon Coast. The Astoria Formation VFE can help educators and their students explore the ecological, geological, and scientific forces that shape the fossil record along the Oregon Coast. As one module of the project, the EPICC VFE outreach team created a taphonomy-focused VFE, From death and decay to database and display: the journey of a fossil through time and space, designed to explore the process by which dead organisms become fossils. Place-based learning features heavily in this module through extensive use of photographs of modern faunal assemblages from Oregon Coast tidepools and beaches as well as in situ fossils of similar ecosystems preserved in the Astoria Formation. To help instructors implement this activity, a student guide was developed with active learning activities that can be modified for either classroom or lab activities. This learning tool is appropriate for a wide range of educational levels, from instructors of grades 7-12 to college instruction, in which ready-made VFEs can be integrated into physical and historical geology courses.

The COVID-19 crisis presents the informal education community with an unprecedented opportunity to develop robust and effective educational materials in support of K-12 educators across the country. Museums and informal education venues nationally are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with a large-scale effort to digitize our educational resources and make them available on-line. While we normally rely on families and teachers to engage with our resources on-site, we are now confronted with the need to turn this equation around and meet our communities not where we are, but wherever they are. The rapid push to develop distance learning resources has just as suddenly highlighted the gaping disparities to digital access – particularly in rural and low-income communities. In 2017 PRI published The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change. This was followed by a series of teacher workshops in climate science that focus on active learning for K-12 students. Activities address topics across the science curriculum and promote the interdisciplinary approaches of critical zone science. A core component of these workshops is the development of hands-on experiments for use in the classroom that employ low-cost and readily accessible materials in order to facilitate widespread adoption. As we are confronted with nationwide school closings our hands-on activities are being adapted to the needs of hands-off education. The activities follow the outline of the Teacher-Friendly Guide, consisting of topical units comprised of a video “experiment” conducted by a PRI educator and written materials for both students and teachers. Students can watch the experiment and work with the data generated in order to gain first-hand experience with the phenomena under investigation. Concurrent with this effort we are tracking the usage of our resources to better understand and serve the needs of our community. At the same time, by working to re-design our activities to be smart-phone friendly and available in mixed media formats, we are working to address the much larger problem of digital access inequality.

VFEs date to the dawn of humanity. Stories, carvings, and cave paintings took people to places they had not actually been. For millennia maps have offered models of places near and far. The Internet, virtual globes, immersive panoramas and innovations in 3D scanning and printing have made stunning changes to what can be reproduced at low cost and in high resolution. The authors have engaged in VFE development for more than a decade. This includes two currently NSF-funded projects: the Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic (EPICC) Project; and the Critical Zone Observatory Network. The discussion will highlight advances in media that are relevant to VFE creation and use; explore pedagogical advantages that can come from these advances; raise questions as to whether or not VFE use improves learner outcomes; and suggest characteristics of design that may be useful in the development of a VFE taxonomy. It will also reflect a research-informed bias that one the best things that VFEs do is catalyze actual fieldwork. Much of the structure of schooling is poorly aligned with what research indicates about how people learn. Does the use of virtual fieldwork more closely align with understandings of how people learn than traditional approaches? What makes one VFE more effective than another? There are several VFE characteristics, both pedagogical and technological, that vary as a product of design, use or both. Directedness: Does the user have autonomy in what and how to explore or is the VFE highly directed? Immersiveness: How deep a sense of place is given by the VFE? Resolution/Scale: At what scales can the site be investigated? Interdisciplinarity & Systems: Field sites are shaped by the interplay of rock, water, soil, air and life - with humans often having profound effects. Does the VFE invite exploration from a systems perspective? Technological adeptness: What technological skills and knowledge are needed for users and creators? Transferability: Can what is learned from exploring a VFE be transferred and applied to investigating other real and virtual sites? What important attributes are missing from this list? How do VFE components relate to what we understand about how people learn? In what ways can features, both individually and collectively, be optimized to enhance learning particular topics and skills?

Evolution education, in both schools and informal education, often focuses on natural selection and the fit of organisms through natural selection to their environment and way of life. Examples of evidence that evolution has occurred are therefore often limited to a modest number of classic but exotic cases, with little attention to how one might apply principles to more familiar organisms. Many of these classic examples are examples of adaptation; adaptation to local environments is, however, an outcome that could in principle also be explained by supernatural creation or design. A frequent result is the perception among the public is that examples of evolution are rare, and that the existence of well-adapted organisms may just as easily be explained metaphysically. We argue that among categories of evidence of evolution accessible to non-specialists in any environment, the most compelling evidence of common ancestry consists of remnants of evolutionary history evident in homologous features, particularly when those homologies are related to lack of fit of organisms to their way of life (“vestiges”) or to better fit that involves complicated combinations of parts usually assigned other functions (“contrivances”). Darwin emphasized the critical nature of this argument from imperfections, and it has been part of traditional catalogs of “evidence for evolution” for more than a century. Yet while remnants of history are widely used as a category of evidence for evolution, their utility in education of comparative anatomy to document body parts passed on through descent is underemphasized in evolution education at all levels. We explore the use of evolutionary remnants to document common ancestry and evidence for evolution, for application to evolution education.

There are two fossil records: the physical fossil record, which consists of specimens, and the abstracted fossil record, which is made up of data derived from those specimens. Museum collections are the conduit between these two fossil records. Over the past several decades, the abstracted fossil record has provided many important insights about the major features of life's history, but it has relied mostly on limited types of data (primarily taxonomic occurrence data) derived from ultimately finite literature sources. In contrast, specimen collections and modern tools for digitizing information about them present an opportunity to transform paleobiology into a "big data" science. Digitally capturing non-traditional (e.g., paleoecological, taphonomic, geochemical, and morphological) data from millions of specimens in museum collections and then integrating them with other unique big data resources has the potential to lead to the most important paleontological discoveries of the twenty-first century.