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1. gPortfolios: A pragmatic approach to online asynchronous assignments

   Hickey, D. T. (April 2020, Information and learning science)

   null (Ed.)

   Purpose: We gathered examples from our extended collaboration to move educators move online while avoiding synchronous meetings. “gPortfolios” are public (to the class) pages where students write responses to carefully constructed engagement routines. Students then discuss their work with instructors and peers in threaded comments. gPortfolios usually include engagement reflections, formative self-assessments, and automated quizzes. These assessments support and document learning while avoiding instructor “burnout” from grading. gPortfolios can be implemented using Google Docs and Forms or any learning management system. Methodology. We report practical insights gained from design-based implementation research. This research explored the late Randi Engle’s principles for productive disciplinary engagement and expansive framing. Engle used current theories of learning to foster student discussions that were both authentic to the academic discipline at hand and productive for learning. This research also used new approaches to assessment to support Engle’s principles. This resulted in a comprehensive approach to online instruction and assessment that is effective and efficient for both students and teachers. Findings. Our approach “frames” (i.e., contextualizes) online engagement using each learners’ own experiences, perspectives, and goals. Writing this revealed how this was different in different courses. Secondary biology students framed each assignment independently. Secondary English and history students framed assignments as elements of a personalized capstone presentation; the history students further used a self-selected “historical theme.” Graduate students framed each assignment in an educational assessment course using a real or imagined curricular aim and context. Originality. Engle’s ideas have yet to be widely taken up in online education. 

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2. Demographic Mediation of the Relationship Between Engagement and Performance in a Blended Dynamics Engineering Course

   Haney, C.; Dridi, A.M.; Rhoads, J.; DeBoer, J.; Berger, E. (December 2021, Proceedings of REES AAEE 2021)

   ABSTRACT CONTEXT This paper examines an engineering dynamics course at Purdue University that was specifically designed to create an active, blended, and collaborative environment. In addition to in-person classes and support, students have access to blended content such as solution videos, mechanics visualizations, a course discussion forum, and interactive simulations. PURPOSE Many studies have shown that students’ engagement in an online discussion forum enhances their learning performance (Davies & Graff, 2005; Hrastinski, 2008). However, our previous research showed that students’ engagement in the online forum of our dynamics course differed significantly across students’ demographics. We showed that women, white, or Asian American students were more likely to be involved in online discussions than men, international, or Hispanic students (Duan et al., 2018). In this paper, we take the previous analysis further by examining whether the observed differences in online student engagement mediate or moderate student performance. APPROACH To answer our research question, we will first investigate the mediation effect by creating two models. A first model with race/international status as the mediating variable and gender identity as a control variable, and a second model with gender identity as the mediating variable and race/international status as a control. Second, we will investigate the moderation effect of demographic factors by creating a regression model including interaction terms to show the relationship of each demographic’s discussion forum engagement to overall performance. The goal of investigating these interaction terms is to determine if a moderating relationship exists where demographic factors impact online engagement, which in turn impact course performance. CONCLUSIONS We find that gender identity is the only significant demographic factor that moderates the effect of a student’s engagement on their performance. Based on the findings of our previous work, students of various racial and ethnic identities do engage differently in the discussion forum. However, this analysis was unable to detect any significant difference in student engagement based on demographics. Our paper contributes to understanding the mechanisms through which students’ engagement can translate into academic performance by focusing on their demographic background. The moderating role of students’ demographic background calls for a more targeted design of instructional tools in blended and collaborative environments to better support students from various demographic backgrounds. 

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3. Transferring Institutions in Different Modalities: Lessons from Undergraduates Across Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1177/15210251231179701  

   Stearns, Elizabeth (June 2023, Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice)

   The broad-scale challenges that higher education undertook in response to the COVID-19 pandemic changed a great deal about the student experience. Ongoing throughout several semesters, those changes may have affected the ways that transfer students experienced transition to the 4-year university setting, with implications for student retention. Interviews with students who transferred from community colleges to a large research university at three different pandemic stages—in 2019, 2020, and 2021—reveal that some aspects of the transfer experience remained consistent, while others changed. Notably, students experienced university-level coursework as academically challenging regardless of its mode of delivery and reported finding a diversity of academic and social options at the university. Transferring into online coursework helped reduce the shock associated with large-enrollment classes and navigating a large campus. Students reported fewer issues overall with course delivery when taking solely online coursework. The paper closes with recommendations to increase transfer student retention. 

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4. Seeding Course Forums using the Teacher-in-the-Loop

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3448139.3448142  

   Shusterman, Einat; Kim, Hyunsoo Gloria; Facciotti, Marc; Igo, Michele; Sripathi, Kamali; Karger, David; Segal, Avi; Gal, Kobi (April 2021, LAK21: 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Online forums are an integral part of modern day courses, but motivating students to participate in educationally beneficial discussions can be challenging. Our proposed solution is to initialize (or “seed”) a new course forum with comments from past instances of the same course that are intended to trigger discussion that is beneficial to learning. In this work, we develop methods for selecting high-quality seeds and evaluate their impact over one course instance of a 186-student biology class. We designed a scale for measuring the “seeding suitability” score of a given thread (an opening comment and its ensuing discussion). We then constructed a supervised machine learning (ML) model for predicting the seeding suitability score of a given thread. This model was evaluated in two ways: first, by comparing its performance to the expert opinion of the course instructors on test/holdout data; and second, by embedding it in a live course, where it was actively used to facilitate seeding by the course instructors. For each reading assignment in the course, we presented a ranked list of seeding recommendations to the course instructors, who could review the list and filter out seeds with inconsistent or malformed content. We then ran a randomized controlled study, in which one group of students was shown seeds that were recommended by the ML model, and another group was shown seeds that were recommended by an alternative model that ranked seeds purely by the length of discussion that was generated in previous course instances. We found that the group of students that received posts from either seeding model generated more discussion than a control group in the course that did not get seeded posts. Furthermore, students who received seeds selected by the ML-based model showed higher levels of engagement, as well as greater learning gains, than those who received seeds ranked by length of discussion. 

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5. Patterns in student self-reported situational interest in online introductory geoscience labs during COVID

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2024.2359318  

   Bitting, Kelsey S; Ryker, Katherine; Teasdale, Rachel (June 2024, Journal of Geoscience Education)

   Triggered situational interest in introductory courses can encourage student engagement, motivation, and value for the geosciences. In-person labs have traditionally played a unique role in triggering situational interest compared to lectures, but the COVID transition online disrupted these dynamics. We examine students’ self-reported situational interest from 6,463 responses to weekly surveys in online introductory geoscience lab courses at five U.S. institutions during fall 2020 and spring 2021. Approximately half of students reported that labs were equally (49.4%) or more interesting (4.3%) online, compared to a hypothetical in-person option. Analysis showed a statistically-significant interaction between student situational interest and the combined effect of 1) the course the students were enrolled in and 2) the topic of the lab session (F (20, 6395) = 4.038, p < 0.001). However, topic and course together explain only about 4% of the variance in the dataset, indicating that other factors have a large role in triggering interest. Students who indicated that labs were less interesting online (46.3%) most often cited not being able to physically interact with instructional materials (56.3%) and difficulty interacting with peers (30.6%). When asked what revisions would increase their situational interest, additional hands-on interaction (22.8%) and increased relevance to their life or future career (20.2%) were the answer choices students selected most frequently. These findings identify modifications and enhancements grounded in students’ self-reported interest that can inform the design of online introductory geology labs. 

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