Student Engagement With Online Course Content at A Two-Year College

Author(s):  
Derek Stadler ◽  
M. Anne O’Reilly
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. 604-604
Author(s):  
Sara Police ◽  
Jessie Hoffman,

Abstract Objectives The purpose of this project was to design, develop and implement an online two-credit course, Drug & Nutrient Interactions, as an elective for a new online Graduate Certificate in Applied Nutrition and Culinary Medicine at the University of Kentucky. Methods Drug & Nutrient Interactions was designed to meet the needs of select student cohorts: undergraduate Pharmacology minors, graduate students enrolled in the Masters in Nutritional Sciences program, and online graduate certificate students. Faculty within the Dept. of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences and the Division of Clinical Nutrition were consulted to identify curricular gaps and to avoid redundancy across programs. Instructional designers were consulted to identify evidence-based best practices in online course design and teaching. Results Content of the Drug and Nutrient Interactions course is structured within four thematic modules: 1. Introduction to Pharmacology and Food & Drug Interactions, 2. Exploring Drug-Nutrient Interactions, 3. Genes, Bugs & Time, and 4. Current and Future Directions in Nutrition & Pharmacology. Each module is three to four weeks in duration, to span a 14-week semester. Each week, students’ tasks include reading, watching, writing, and reviewing content related to the student learning objectives. Methods to promote student engagement with the content recur week-to-week, to ensure consistency for students’ experience. An eBook was written by the instructors to provide a current and interdisciplinary review of the intersections of nutritional sciences and pharmacology in the course. In lieu of proctored online exams, module-level assignments assess students’ achievement of learning outcomes. Drug & Nutrient Interactions launched in fall 2019 with nine students enrolling and completing the course. Course analytics track student engagement by logging page views and participation. Increasing students’ page views and participation align with due dates for module assignments. Therefore - in spring 2020, deadlines were shifted to a weekly timeline to foster consistent engagement. Conclusions Instructors should explore various methods to foster student-content, student-student and student-instructor engagement in an online learning environment. Funding Sources This course project was funded by a UK Online award & an Alternative Textbook grant.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Attwood

This anecdotal pilot case study of practice addresses the question: How can technology be used to make online history courses more engaging with museums? Findings from this case study suggest that virtual art museums via the Google Cultural Institute (now Google Arts & Culture) were an effective way to encourage students to do more than the minimum required for the online forum response assignment in a survey (100-level) history course at a community college in the northwest United States. The instructor designed an assignment that was posted in the learning management system as a PDF. Implications for practice are that online instructors of history, as well as online instructors of humanities, can assign virtual art museum visits with an online discussion component to encourage student engagement centered on course content.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 238212052110377
Author(s):  
Paige Eansor ◽  
Madeleine E. Norris ◽  
Leah A. D’Souza ◽  
Glenn S. Bauman ◽  
Zahra Kassam ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The Anatomy and Radiology Contouring (ARC) Bootcamp was a face-to-face (F2F) course designed to ensure radiation oncology residents were equipped with the knowledge and skillset to use radiation therapy techniques properly. The ARC Bootcamp was proven to be a useful educational intervention for improving learners’ knowledge of anatomy and radiology and contouring ability. An online version of the course was created to increase accessibility to the ARC Bootcamp and provide a flexible, self-paced learning environment. This study aimed to describe the instructional design model used to create the online offering and report participants’ motivation to enroll in the course and the online ARC Bootcamp's strengths and improvement areas. METHODS The creation of the online course followed the analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (ADDIE) framework. The course was structured in a linear progression of locked modules consisting of radiology and contouring lectures, anatomy labs, and integrated evaluations. RESULTS The online course launched on the platform Teachable in November 2019, and by January 2021, 140 participants had enrolled in the course, with 27 participants completing all course components. The course had broad geographic participation with learners from 19 different countries. Of the participants enrolled, 34% were female, and most were radiation oncology residents (56%), followed by other programs (24%), such as medical physics residents or medical students. The primary motivator for participants to enroll was to improve their subject knowledge/skill (44%). The most common strength identified by participants was the course's quality (41%), and the most common improvement area was to incorporate more course content (41%). CONCLUSIONS The creation of the online ARC Bootcamp using the ADDIE framework was feasible. The course is accessible to diverse geographic regions and programs and provides a flexible learning environment; however, the course completion rate was low. Participants’ feedback regarding their experiences will inform future offerings of the online course.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Shepherd ◽  
Doris Bolliger

Facilitating an online course in today’s student population requires an educator to be innovative and creative and to have an impactful online presence. In the current online learning environment (also known as e-learning), keeping students’ thoughtfully engaged and motivated while dispensing the required course content necessitates faculty enabling a safe, nonjudgmental environment whereby views, perspectives, and personal and professional experiences are encouraged. The educator must exhibit an educator-facilitated active, student-centered learning process, whereby students are held accountable for their active participation and self-directed learning while balancing a facilitator role to further enhance the learning process. This article explores one educator’s reflective practice process that has been developed over numerous years as a very early adopter of online education. It will explore the organizational aspect of teaching-facilitating a dynamic robust online course.


Author(s):  
Debra Sprague

Flipping the classroom has gained much attention over the past couple of years. It involves using video and online technologies to provide the lecture portion of a lesson. Students view the online lecture for homework, while class time is spent engaged in applying what is learned from the lecture. By doing this, it is believed students become active learners and take more responsibility for their learning.Although a skeptic of the flipped learning model (after all, a lecture is a lecture no matter what format it takes) the presenter decided to give it a try and flip one of her teacher education courses. The result was more student engagement, better quality of student work, and increase in student evaluations.This presentation will focus on strategies for flipping a course through the creation of a hybrid (combination of online and face-to-face) course. The presenter will share with the audience how she provided meaningful online activities and how she engaged the students during the face-to-face classes. Although the course content derives from the education discipline, the strategies presented can fit any content area.


Author(s):  
Sylvie Doré

The goal of this pre-study was to prescribe a solution to a perceived decrease in student engagement in an elective course on additive manufacturing. The objectives were to:identify in what activities the students are engaging; identify causes for lack of engagement in their studies, if any;identify possible changes to the additive manufacturing course.A mixed (quantitative and qualitative) triangulation interpretivist approach was used to address the first two objectives. Approximately half (1/2) the students stated that their studies was not their priority, two thirds (2/3) reported that they attended university primarily to earn a diploma rather than to learn and again two thirds (2/3) said that they had difficulty concentrating, signs that most students are not fully engaged in learning. The qualitative analysis provided insight and nuance to the quantitative analysis. It made it possible to identify sources for lack of engagement. Apart from the presence of electronic devices which distract attention, teaching methods, course content and evaluation modalities were often cited. Based on the findings, three changes are suggested to the course


Author(s):  
Kristen M. Lindahl ◽  
Zuzana Tomas ◽  
Raichle Farrelly ◽  
Anna Krulatz

Service-learning (SL) constitutes a particularly effective vehicle for engaging pre-service teachers with ELs during their university-level coursework, mostly due to the nature of SL that addresses the potential cultural and linguistic mismatch between teachers and learners in today's school systems by encouraging future educators to engage with the communities of their students long before they enter the teaching profession. This chapter describes four cases that demonstrate how second language (L2) teacher education programs utilize service-learning (SL) to engage pre-service teachers in diverse cultural and linguistic contexts through the lens of pedagogy of particularity. Each case presents four consistent key principles of service-learning: course content, community collaboration, integrated assignments that guide student engagement, and reflective practices that culminate the SL experience.


Author(s):  
Cathryn Crosby

The increase in online courses offered in higher education, the reliance on highly developed academic literacy skills to learn course content, the complex nature of media literacy, the negotiation of multiple technologies, and the corresponding media literacy together can be quite challenging for online learners. Most research conducted on academic literacies has focused primarily on academic reading and writing practices rather than on media literacy. This chapter discusses an investigation of media literacy in an online course, the experience learners had with this literacy and online tasks. The chapter discusses results of data from the online learners and instructor, which showed the instructor required different media literacy proficiency than what the online learners possessed prior to beginning the online course. Finally, the chapter presents implications the study findings have for online instructors' effective development, design, and delivery of online courses and development of online learners' media literacy.


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