EGUsphere EGUsphere EGUsphere EGUsphere Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/egusphere-2025-3899 GC Insights: Designing for full-phase inquiry in virtual fieldwork – upper secondary school students’ exploration of extinction events Malm Rie Hjørnegaard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4323-3491 1 Hansen Kristen Rune Skalborg 2 Evans Robert 1 Madsen Lene Møller 1 Milán Jesper https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9556-3177 3 Thibaut Nicolas Rudolph https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4147-5531 4 Kennedy Ben 5 Department Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 2200, Denmark KVUC - Copenhagen Adult Education Centre, Copenhagen, 1120, Denmark KALK - East Zealand Museums, Faxe, 4640, Denmark Department Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 1958, Denmark School of Earth and Environment, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 8140, Aotearoa New Zealand 09 09 2025 2025 1 8 Copyright: © 2025 Rie Hjørnegaard Malm et al. 2025 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-3899/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-3899/egusphere-2025-3899.pdf

When designing virtual field courses it is challenging to create a truly explorative course element. In relation to theories of student learning, this has been problematised, and more inquiry and student-centred virtual fieldwork has been proposed to allow for authentic exploration and engagement. Here, we outline the development of a full-phase inquiry virtual fieldwork activity using 360 videos with additional classroom tools that allows students to collect data, work out hypotheses independently, and combine with known science relationships to draw geologically viable conclusions.