More Like this

1. Where’s My Whiteboard? The Challenge of Moving Active-learning Mathematics Classes Online

   Nelson, Jill K. ; Rosenberg, Jessica ; Fernandez, Kathryn ; Shank, Julie ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   This research paper studies the challenges that mathematics faculty and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) faced when moving active and collaborative calculus courses from in-person to virtual instruction. As part of a larger pedagogical change project (described below), the math department at a public Research-1 university began transitioning pre-calculus and calculus courses to an active and collaborative learning (ACL) format in Fall 2019. The change began with the introduction of collaborative worksheets in recitations which were led by GTAs and supported by undergraduate learning assistants (LAs). Students recitation periods collaboratively solving the worksheet problems on whiteboards. When COVID-19 forced the rapidmore »transition to online teaching, these ACL efforts faced an array of challenges. Faculty and GTA reflections on the changes to teaching and learning provide insight into how instructional staff can be supported in implementing ACL across various modes of instruction. The calculus teaching change efforts discussed in this paper are part of an NSF-supported project that aims to make ACL the default method of instruction in highly enrolled gateway STEM courses across the institution. The theoretical framework for the project builds on existing work on grassroots change in higher education (Kezar and Lester, 2011) to study the effect of communities of practice on changing teaching culture. The project uses course-based communities of practice (Wenger, 1999) that include instructors, GTAs, and LAs working together to design and enact teaching change in the targeted courses alongside ongoing professional development for GTAs and LAs. Six faculty and five GTAs involved in the teaching change effort in mathematics were interviewed after the Spring 2020 semester ended. Interview questions focused on faculty and GTA experiences implementing active learning after the rapid transition to online teaching. A grounded coding scheme was used to identify common themes in the challenges faced by instructors and GTAs as they moved online and in the impacts of technology, LA support, and the department community of practice on the move to online teaching. Technology, including both access and capabilities, emerged as a common barrier to student engagement. A particular barrier was students’ reluctance to share video or participate orally in sessions that were being recorded, making group work more difficult than it had been in a physical classroom. In addition, most students lacked access to a tablet for freehand writing, presenting a significant hurdle for sharing mathematical notation when physical whiteboards were no longer an option. These challenges point to the importance of incorporating flexibility in active learning implementation and in the professional development that supports teaching changes toward active learning, since what is conceived for a collaborative physical classroom may be implemented in a much different environment. The full paper will present a detailed analysis of the data to better understand how faculty and GTA experiences in the transition to online delivery can inform planning and professional development as the larger institutional change effort moves forward both in mathematics and in other STEM fields.« less
2. A Rapid and Formative Response by the Engineering Education Faculty to Support the Engineering Faculty and Students Throughout the Extreme Classroom Changes Resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36606  

   White, Lance ; Jaison, Donna ; Ray, Samantha ; Brumbelow, Kelly ; Fields, Sherecce ; Barroso, Luciana ; Watson, Karan ; Hammond, Tracy ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   This paper describes an evidence based-practice paper to a formative response to the engineering faculty and students’ needs at Anonymous University. Within two weeks, the pandemic forced the vast majority of the 1.5 million faculty and 20 million students nationwide to transition all courses from face-to-face to entirely online. Never in the history of higher education has there been a concerted effort to adapt so quickly and radically, nor have we had the technology to facilitate such a rapid and massive change. At Anonymous University, over 700 engineering educators were racing to transition their courses. Many of those faculty hadmore »never experienced online course preparation, much less taught one synchronously or asynchronously. Faculty development centers and technology specialists across the university made a great effort to aid educators in this transition. These educators had questions about the best practices for moving online, how their students were affected, and the best ways to engage their students. However, these faculty’s detailed questions were answerable only by faculty peers’ experience, students’ feedback, and advice from experts in relevant engineering education research-based practices. This paper describes rapid, continuous, and formative feedback provided by the Engineering Education Faculty Group (EEFG) to provide an immediate response for peer faculty guidance during the pandemic, creating a community of practice. The faculty membership spans multiple colleges in the university, including engineering, education, and liberal arts. The EEFG transitioned immediately to weekly meetings focused on the rapidly changing needs of their colleagues. Two surveys were generated rapidly by Hammond et al. to characterize student and faculty concerns and needs in March of 2020 and were distributed through various means and media. Survey 1 and 2 had 3381 and 1506 respondents respectively with most being students, with 113 faculty respondents in survey 1, the focus of this piece of work. The first survey was disseminated as aggregated data to the College of Engineering faculty with suggested modifications to course structures based on these findings. The EEFG continued to meet and collaborate during the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester and has continued through to this day. This group has acted as a hub for teaching innovation in remote online pedagogy and techniques, while also operating as a support structure for members of the group, aiding those members with training in teaching tools, discussion difficult current events, and various challenges they are facing in their professional teaching lives. While the aggregated data gathered from the surveys developed by Hammond et al. was useful beyond measure in the early weeks of the pandemic, little attention at the time was given to the responses of faculty to that survey. The focus of this work has been to characterize faculty perceptions at the beginning of the pandemic and compare those responses between engineering and non-engineering faculty respondents, while also comparing reported perceptions of pre- and post-transition to remote online teaching. Interviews were conducted between 4 members of the EEFG with the goal of characterizing some of the experiences they have had while being members of the group during the time of the pandemic utilizing Grounded theory qualitative analysis.« less
3. Strategies to Address Changes in Social Supports during the COVID-19 Pandemic

   Johnston, A. C. ; Douglas, K. A. ; Martin, J. P. ; Short, T. ( June 2021 , American Society for Engineering Education 2021 Annual Conference and Exposition)

   The pandemic of COVID-19 is disrupting engineering education globally, at all levels of education.While distance education is nothing new, the pandemic of COVID-19 forced instructors to rapidly move their courses online whether or not they had ever received prior training in online education. In particular, there is very little literature to guide instructors in supporting students in online engineering design or project-based courses. The purpose of this research is to examine engineering students’ report of social support in their project and design-based courses at a large research university during the move to online instruction due to COVID-19in the Spring 2020more »semester and to provide recommendations for instructors teaching these types of courses online in the future.Our study is framed by social constructivism and social capital theory.We surveyed undergraduate engineering and engineering technology students(n=235) across undergraduate levels during the final week of the Spring 2019 semester.Survey questions included open-ended prompts about social supports and overall experience with the transition to online learning as well as name and resource generator questions focused on specific people and types of interactions that changed during the pandemic. We used qualitative content analysis of the open-ended responses along with comparisons of the name and resource generator to develop recommendations for instructors.Recommendations to increase students’ social supports include:facilitating informal conversations between students and between students and the instructional team, grouping students located in the same time zones in teams, facilitating co-working sessions for students, establishing weekly structure, and utilizing some synchronous components (e.g., virtual office hours).« less
4. New Online Accommodations Are Not Enough: The Mismatch between Student Needs and Supports Given for Students with Disabilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00280-21  

   Gin, Logan E. ; Pais, Danielle C. ; Parrish, Kristen D. ; Brownell, Sara E. ; Cooper, Katelyn M. ( April 2022 , Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education)

   ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in nearly all universities transitioning their in-person courses to online instruction. Recent work from our research team conducted in Spring 2020 established that the immediate transition to online learning presented novel challenges for students with disabilities: students were unable to access previously established accommodations and there was a lack of information from Disability Resource Centers (DRCs) about adapting accommodations to online environments. In this study, we aimed to determine the extent to which these issues still were present 1 year later. In Spring 2021, we conducted a survey of 114 students with disabilities who weremore »registered with the DRC and taking online science courses at a public research-intensive institution. We used our previous interviews with students to develop closed- and open-ended questions to assess the extent to which students with disabilities were being properly accommodated in their courses, document any new accommodations they were using, and elicit any recommendations they had for improving their experiences in online science courses. We used logistic regression to analyze the closed-ended data and inductive coding to analyze the open-ended data. We found that more than half of students with disabilities reported not being properly accommodated, and this was more likely to be reported by students who experienced new challenges related to online learning. When students were asked what accommodations they would have wanted, students often described accommodations that were being offered to some students but were not universally implemented. This study summarizes recommendations for making online science learning environments more inclusive for students with disabilities.« less
5. The Effectiveness of Synchronous vs Asynchronous Modes of Instruction in an Online Flipped Design Thinking Course

   Mohandas, L. ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Motivation: This is a complete paper. There was a sudden shift from traditional learning to online learning in Spring 2020 with the outbreak of COVID-19. Although online learning is not a new topic of discussion, universities, faculty, and students were not prepared for this sudden change in learning. According to a recent article in ‘The Chronicle of Higher Education, “even under the best of circumstances, virtual learning requires a different, carefully crafted approach to engagement”. The Design Thinking course under study is a required freshmen level course offered in a Mid-western University. The Design Thinking course is offered in amore »flipped format where all the content to be learned is given to students beforehand and the in-class session is used for active discussions and hands-on learning related to the content provided at the small group level. The final learning objective of the course is a group project where student groups are expected to come up with functional prototypes to solve a real-world problem following the Design Thinking process. There were eighteen sections of the Design Thinking course offered in Spring 2020, and with the outbreak of COVID-19, a few instructors decided to offer synchronous online classes (where instructors were present online during class time and provided orientation and guidance just like a normal class) and a few others decided to offer asynchronous online classes (where orientation from the instructor was delivered asynchronous and the instructor was online during officially scheduled class time but interactions were more like office hours). Students were required to be present synchronously at the team level during the class time in a synchronous online class. In an asynchronous online class, students could be synchronous at the team level to complete their assignment any time prior to the deadline such that they could work during class time but they were not required to work at that time. Through this complete paper, we are trying to understand student learning, social presence and learner satisfaction with respect to different modes of instruction in a freshmen level Design Thinking course. Background: According to literature, synchronous online learning has advantages such as interaction, a classroom environment, and better course quality whereas asynchronous online learning has advantages such as self-controlled and self-directed learning. The disadvantages of synchronous online learning include the learning process, technology issues, and distraction. Social isolation, lack of interaction, and technology issue are a few disadvantages related to asynchronous online learning. Problem Being Addressed: There is a limited literature base investigating different modes of online instruction in a Design Thinking course. Through this paper, we are trying to understand and share the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous modes of instruction in an online Flipped Design Thinking Course. The results of the paper could also help in this time of pandemic by shedding light on the more effective way to teach highly active group-based classrooms for better student learning, social presence, and learner satisfaction. Method/Assessment: An end of semester survey was monitored in Spring 2020 to understand student experiences in synchronous and asynchronous Design Thinking course sections. The survey was sent to 720 students enrolled in the course in Spring 2020 and 324 students responded to the survey. Learning was measured using the survey instrument developed by Walker (2003) and the social presence and learner satisfaction was measured by the survey modified by Richardson and Swan (2003). Likert scale was used to measure survey responses. Anticipated Results: Data would be analyzed and the paper would be completed by draft paper submission. As the course under study is a flipped and active course with a significant component of group work, the anticipated results after analysis could be that one mode of instruction has higher student learning, social presence, and learner satisfaction compared to the other.« less