Summary

This is a very well written, insightful paper outlining experiences in using a virtual field trip format to replace a long standing in person field class conducted at James Madison University, Virginia, USA.  The authors clearly state the history and objectives of the virtual field trip development and provide a clear assessment of the results of running the trip.  I really appreciated the pros and cons of conventional vs virtual methods, in part because I think they are spot on based on my experience, but also because it is important for these things to be pointed out.  All in all, a really nice paper. 

The paper is well enough written that it could be essentially published as it.  I have a few minor knit picky points linked to line numbers below, but all of them are very minor.  My only significant comment is I think a lot of figures could be improved.  There were very few annotations on the figures that I could read, no doubt because most of the figures are screen shots from the virtual field trip.  For some things this is trivial, but for some of the images where there are important annotations that the students would see, this makes it hard to grasp what is presented to the students.   This is an easy fix; if you use something like illustrator you could just reproduce the text box over the screen shot.  You might be able to do more high resolution screenshots too?  Depends on the software I would guess.

Specific comments keyed to text:

98-100: maybe clarify that these represent clastic wedges shed from the orogenic highland? 

101: reference figure 1

115:  drop the “will”—future tense not necessary here

291:  Might be worth mentioning here that 3D terrain models can allow virtual measurements quite easily, so had those been included this could have been done.  There are several sources for this, but my former student’s paper (Brush et al., 2018, Geosphere) has a description of using the method.  There are a lot of other references, most cited in that paper; or you could reference the QGIS extension qsurf, which is an open source solution to the problem.

312:  I wouldn’t use the term faulting here; that means brittle deformation to most people.  I’d say ductile shear or ductile shear zone development

332:  This whole section suffers from lack of clarity on how much of the field trip mechanics is automated and how much relies on direct communication with the instructor.  This is an important point for anyone who wants to export what you’ve learned here to their exact situation.

430:  “lousy weather” may not translate well in this European journal.  Bad weather would be better!

498:  say “virtual class”; as worded it could be read as they “virtually indicated” as in they nearly all indicated.

677:  You might note that it might be more than tactile.  I’m not an expert on memory, but I have certainly read popular science articles that indicate that environmental factors can be powerful long term memory influences.  Something as simple as smells or sounds could impact people’s ability to remember things more than 5 minutes at the outcrop.  Might be worth a comment?

Most of the figures with Google earth screen shots have illegible lettering.  Not sure how to fix this, but it is a problem.  Can you use a different monitor for the screen shot and reduce the figure to make higher resolution images?

Links are not live on the pdf I have, so I couldn’t easily jump the NAGT website referenced

• The first three sections focus on providing a detailed descript of the course itself. Traditionally, in APA formatting a lot of this content might be reserved for a “present study” section or within the Methods section. Related, a lot of the background for the survey design on historical inclusion of diversity within geoscience could be moved into an “Introduction” section. Please check on the requirements of the journal (this might be okay and just an organizational style I am not used to). It does read clearly, but feels more conversational and less theoretically-driven.
• Related, each paragraph seems to begin by identifying the personal experience of the educator, how they went about trying to make the virtual field trip the same as the actual field trip, and then (sometimes) reference to previous literature. This likely reflects the experience of the educator, but I wonder if the theoretical argument of the manuscript would be strengthened by prioritizing theory that then drives the development of the curriculum? For example, there are no citation provided in section 3.3, suggesting everything discussed was from the educators’ experience. Another example is the paragraph beginning on line 247, which begins by identifying the need to adjust teaching styles. There is a body of research examining teaching styles in online versus in-person contexts – why not begin with relevant theoretically-motivated, empirically-evaluated principles and then show how they were used to design the curriculum? In this way, the sections of the introduction might be framed around key issues/concerns when developing any field experience in a virtual space.
• In addition, I think these introductory sections would be strengthened by adding a focus from cognitive psychology and education on people’s reasoning within real versus virtual environments. For example, are people able to navigate in the same way in both spaces? Can people develop mental maps of space when navigating through virtually vs. physically?

• The section on Community Access to Virtual Field Experiences does not seem to be part of a larger logical argument. How does this section inform the current study? Did the current study use these materials? Take similar methodological approaches? (I think this may be the aim of the section, but should be explicitly identified).

• Could you provide more information regarding the methods?
  • What questions were asked? Or if too many to list all, could you provide the number of questions under each theme and a metric for internal reliability? Were they open-ended questions or multiple choice?
  • How was the data were coded into themes? Did you obtain a metric of inter-coder reliability?
  • Were the respondents’ demographic information similar across cohorts? What span of years were the previous students drawn from (e.g., the last 1, 5, 10 years)? Is the course offered in the Spring and Fall semesters (in which case previous students in the Spring semester may have different experiences then offerings in the fall because they have more student experience)? Did the same educator teach in the previous years (if different this may have influenced the results)?

• The introduction should discuss preferred learning styles (which is a technical term in education) since that is a main outcome of the survey. To note, there is research showing that aligning teaching styles with students preferred learning styles does *not* improve learning. That student learning is more influenced by aligning appropriate teaching styles as per the content demands