Self-guided field trips for students of environments

In many learning institutions around the world, there is a trend towards larger classes, more ?exible learning pathways and reduced teaching resources. Experiential learning is often used in the form of site visits or ?eld trips for students studying engineering, natural resource management, geography and similar disciplines. Providing opportunities for students to undertake ?eld trips without the traditional support mechanism is one of the more challenging issues for subject designers. How can large cohorts of students gain practical exposure to various aspects of the natural or built environment? Although this is typically done using traditional site visits and ?eldwork with a high staff/student ratio, the goal has been to use action research to design and develop resources to enable small groups (three or four) to make self-guided visits to sites close to campus. Multimedia resources to examine and interpret aspects of the site that relate to their on-campus learning guide the students. One critical issue in the success of these activities has been proper risk assessment and control procedures. The outcome of this research is a framework to provide a safe, active learning experience by way of self-guided ?eld trips that is suitable for implementation with large classes.