Geographically-Referenced Teaching and Learning (GReTL): Making a virtue out of necessity in distance education and citizen science – the example of the Evolution MegaLab

Background/Question/Methods

For science education that targets an adult audience to be truly accessible, educators must go to the citizen and not expect the citizen to come to them. This is the distance education model adopted so successfully by The Open University which is the largest university by student numbers (> 200,000) in Europe.  Teaching and learning at a distance present a whole range of problems, not the least being that each student’s  environment is particular to them. How can every student participate equally in an ecology practical exercise, for example, if their mobility and the habitats available to them vary with their location? One solution is to make a virtue of the geographical variation across the student body. This is particularly appropriate in the teaching of ecology and evolution, but can also find application in the teaching of other sciences as well as subjects in the arts and humanities. I call the approach Geographically-Referenced Teaching and Learning (GReTL). Although the name is new, the concept is not. For example, data gathered by Open University students on geographical variation in industrial melanism in the peppered moth contributed to a study published in Science in 1986 (Cook, L.M. et al. Science, 1986. 231:611-613.). Citizen science can also benefit from GReTL.

Results/Conclusions

I will describe a new GReTL project called the Evolution MegaLab (www.evolutionmegalab.org) that is currently being trialled in Europe for use in distance teaching and citizen science in 2009 when we will celebrate the 200^th Anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The project is designed to give participants a hands-on experience of evolutionary change by inviting them to help in a survey of shell polymorphism in the banded snails Cepaea nemoralis and C. hortensis. Data submitted by the public over the web will be automatically compared with historical records from nearby locations and participants will receive instant feedback on any evolutionary change that may have taken place.