- Award ID(s):
- 1943870
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10403112
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Asynchronous online courses are popular because they offer benefits to both students and instructors. Students benefit from the convenience, flexibility, affordability, freedom of geography, and access to information. Instructors and institutions benefit by having a broad geographical reach, scalability, and cost-savings of no physical classroom. A challenge with asynchronous online courses is providing students with engaging, collaborative and interactive experiences. Here, we describe how an online poster symposium can be used as a unique educational experience and assessment tool in a large-enrollment (e.g., 500 students), asynchronous, natural science, general education (GE) course. The course, Introduction to Environmental Science (ENR2100), was delivered using distance education (DE) technology over a 15-week semester. In ENR2100 students learn a variety of topics including freshwater resources, surface water, aquifers, groundwater hydrology, ecohydrology, coastal and ocean circulation, drinking water, water purification, wastewater treatment, irrigation, urban and agricultural runoff, sediment and contaminant transport, water cycle, water policy, water pollution, and water quality. Here we present a is a long-term study that takes place from 2017 to 2022 (before and after COVID-19) and involved 5,625 students over 8 semesters. Scaffolding was used to break up the poster project into smaller, more manageable assignments, which students completed throughout the semester. Instructions, examples, how-to videos, book chapters and rubrics were used to accommodate Students’ different levels of knowledge. Poster assignments were designed to teach students how to find and critically evaluate sources of information, recognize the changing nature of scientific knowledge, methods, models and tools, understand the application of scientific data and technological developments, and evaluate the social and ethical implications of natural science discoveries. At the end of the semester students participated in an asynchronous online poster symposium. Each student delivered a 5-min poster presentation using an online learning management system and completed peer reviews of their classmates’ posters using a rubric. This poster project met the learning objectives of our natural science, general education course and taught students important written, visual and verbal communication skills. Students were surveyed to determine, which parts of the course were most effective for instruction and learning. Students ranked poster assignments first, followed closely by lectures videos. Approximately 87% of students were confident that they could produce a scientific poster in the future and 80% of students recommended virtual poster symposiums for online courses.more » « less
-
Abstract Online educational videos have the potential to enhance undergraduate biology learning, for example by showcasing contemporary scientific research and providing content coverage. Here, we describe the integration of nine videos into a large‐enrollment (
n = 356) introductory evolution and ecology course via weekly homework assignments. We predicted that videos that feature research stories from contemporary scientists could reinforce topics introduced in lecture and provide students with novel insights into the nature of scientific research. Using qualitative analysis of open‐ended written feedback from the students on each video assigned throughout the term (n = 133–229 responses per video) and on end‐of‐quarter evaluations (n = 243), we identified common categories of student perspectives. All videos received more positive than negative comments and all videos received comments indicating that students found them intellectually and emotionally stimulating, accessible, and relevant to course content. Additionally, all videos also received comments indicating some students found them intellectually unstimulating, though these comments were generally far less numerous than positive comments. Students responded positively to videos that incorporated at least one of the following: documentary‐style filming, very clear links to course content (especially hands‐on activities completed by the students), relevance to recent world events, clarity on difficult topics, and/or charismatic narrators or species. We discuss opportunities and challenges for the use of online educational videos in teaching ecology and evolution, and we provide guidelines instructors can use to integrate them into their courses. -
There has been growing evidence that flipped teaching (FT) can increase student engagement. Traditional lecture-based teaching (TT) method was compared with FT and FT combined with retrieval practice (FTR) in a 400-level Exercise Physiology course over eight semesters. In the FT format, lecture content was assigned for students to prepare before class along with an online quiz. During class, the assigned content and quiz questions were reviewed, and a team-based learning (TBL) activity was conducted. Students found FT implementation three times a week (FT3) to be overwhelming, which led to reconfiguration of the FT design to minimize the quiz and TBL sessions to one per week. Subsequently, FT was combined with retrieval exercises (FTR), which involved recalling information, thus promoting retention. The students in the FTR format were given weekly quizzes in class, where no notes were allowed, which affected their quiz grade negatively compared with FT ( P < 0.0001). Again, no resources were permitted during FTR’s TBL sessions. When exam scores were compared with TT, student performance was significantly greater ( P < 0.001) with the FT and FTR methods, suggesting these methods are superior to TT. While both male and female students benefited from FT and FTR methods compared with TT ( P = 0.0008), male students benefited the most (( P = 0.0001). Similarly, when the exam scores were organized into upper and lower halves, both groups benefited from FT and FTR ( P < 0.0001) approaches. In conclusion, both FT and FTR methods benefit students more compared with TT, and male students are impacted the most.more » « less
-
Ecological Dynamics and Forecasting' is a semester-long course to introduce students to the fundamentals of ecological dynamics and forecasting. This course implements paper-based discussion to introduce students to concepts and ideas and R-based tutorials for hands-on application and training. The course material includes a reading list with prompting questions for discussions, teachers notes for guiding discussions, lecture notes for live coding demonstrations, and video presentations of all R tutorials. This course material can be used either as self-directed learning or as all or part of a college or university course. Individual learners have access to all of the necessary material - including discussion questions and instructor notes - on the website. The course focuses on papers with an open-access or free-to-read version where possible, though some materials still rely on access to closed-access papers. The course is structured around two sessions per week, with most weeks consisting of a one hour paper discussion session and a 1-2 hour session focused on applications in R. R tutorials use publicly available ecological datasets to provide realistic applications. Because the material is organized around content themes, instructors can modify and remix materials based on their course goals and student levels of background knowledge. These course materials have been taught for several years at the authors’ university and have also generated significant online engagement with course videos tens of thousands of times.more » « less
-
Most engineering students are rarely assigned creative tasks to think abstractly around mathematical models, other than being asked to apply theory to real-world scenarios. Challenging the traditional pedagogy, students enrolled in inventory and supply chain system design and control, an upper-level industrial and systems engineering course, were asked to complete two poems throughout the semester-long course. The students were asked to construct poems around a concept, model, or topic covered in the course: the first poem was focused on deterministic inventory modeling and the second poem was focused on stochastic inventory modeling. At the end of the semester, students completed a lookback survey asking several open-ended questions detailing their experience and attitude towards these creative writing assignments. Data was collected during the semesters Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 and of the 84 total students over the two semesters, 64 consented to participate in the study. The student responses to reflection prompts and student-written poems were analyzed to understand how engineering students approached this creative writing assignment, what type of creative processes they utilized to complete these assignments, and how these assignments contributed to their learning. To this end, the student responses to reflection prompts were analyzed to identify the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as to elicit the steps of their processes toward completing these assignments. A sample of of student-written poems were examined in detail to assess their technical accuracy as well. In this paper, we will present our findings on why students pick specific topics for their poems and how their reasons for choosing topics influence their effort in their writing as well as the technical accuracy of their poems.more » « less