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May 2021 – July 2022 | Senior Teaching Assistant in Virtual Field Trips (100% teaching position)

University College London, UK.


Responsibilities

  • Developed engaging virtual and blended-learning videos, outcrop models, exercises, and virtual field trips.
  • Overhauled existing content and developed innovative new programs of lectures, practical exercises, and supplementary material suitable for online & hybrid teaching.
  • Overhauled international field trips for new UK localities while maintaining existing learning objectives.

Teaching

  • Development and teaching: Pembrokeshire field trip (2nd & 3rd year UG, MSc)
  • Development and teaching: Bradgate Park field trip (2nd year UG)
  • Development and teaching: Maps, Images, & Structures (2nd year UG)
  • Development and teaching: Undergraduate Mapping (3rd year UG)
  • Development and teaching: Dorset virtual field trip (1st year UG)
  • Development and teaching: Cornwall virtual field trip (1st year UG)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I completely overhauled the department’s fieldwork teaching into virtual field trips accessible to students all around the world. This included planning, filming, and editing educational videos — both on location in the field and in my home studio — to ensure that students could see and experience fieldwork even when they couldn’t be present themselves. This involved creative film-making to highlight the important features and mimic in-camera a trained geologist’s eye so that the students could learn to see like a geologist without seeing the rocks for themselves. In addition to videos, I also produced detailed Google Earth projects, interactive websites, photogrammetric outcrop models, and gigapixel panoramas.

Bradgate Park Virtual/Hybrid Field Trip

Bradgate Park Virtual/Hybrid Field Trip

This virtual/hybrid field trip used Google Earth as the foundation to allow students to appreciate the spatial relationships between outcrops and added explanatory videos and photogrammetric models.

Pembrokeshire Field Guide

Pembrokeshire Field Guide

This detailed field guide I produced for the Pembrokeshire field trip covers logistics information, health and safety guidance, background knowledge, and exercises.


I’m Alex Clarke

I am a structural geologist working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Johannes Gutenberg–Universität Mainz and a hobbyist girl-with-camera.

My research focuses on the heterogeneities within large faults, shear zones, and subduction zone mélanges — how to map them, quantify them, and explain their origins. I am especially interested in 3D reconstructions of rocks and outcrops which allow detailed, realistic, and quantifiable models of natural phenomena. I also love to teach and I am interested in innovative and engaging methods of teaching earth sciences, both in the classroom and in the field.

In my free time, I enjoy photography and my images reflects my love of nature and the diverse forms nature can take.