Abstract
Lidar remote sensing, which uses laser pulses to measure three-dimensional structure, has become essential across natural science disciplines. However, undergraduate students typically receive limited, if any, exposure to this technology and rarely have opportunities to experience it. Experiential and multi-modal courses may be ideal for introducing students to lidar. We offered an experiential course focused on research assessing properties of wildlife habitat to undergraduate students at the University of Idaho. A majority of course time was spent in the field, but students also participated in online class activities. A key feature of this course was introducing students to lidar through an experiential curriculum that included an introductory lecture, data collection in the field, and a tutorial on visualizing and analyzing the data. Students reported that field work and lidar activities were the most useful for achieving learning goals for this course. Our course demonstrates that multi-modal experiential courses may be effective settings to introduce students to lidar remote sensing.