Challenges
- Running out of physical space: As enrollments continue to increase, there is no corresponding increase in lab space.
- Update material: The course material has not been updated in many years and there was a desire to find a way to make it more engaging and interesting to students.
Meeting the Challenge
Biology approached us with the following general guidelines in which they wanted us to follow when redesigning Biology 12:
- Utilize new educational technologies to redesign the course
- Redesign the material in the lab to make it more engaging and interesting
- Be sure that the new course runs through the ANGEL CMS
The New Course Design
- Create a modular learning event that will be self-paced. We wanted to design the course so that students could take the lab on their own time and at their own pace, a basic benefit of basic e-learning. Instead of having to get everything done within the current 2 hour class format, the online lab would be available all week long for them to complete.
- Develop media learning objects. We proposed taking the more static elements of the learning for this lab, such as plant structures, pollination and plant reproduction and create narrated animations. We designed these to be modular and usable by themselves (therefore, an object). We also created a number of interactive exercises that allowed students to apply their mastery of the content.
- Use of the Blogs at Penn State platform as the content assembly and delivery tool. We decided to employ this platform because it made sense for many reasons:
- Using the blog platform to create and integrate media is EASY. You can create and publish quickly.
- The output (web pages) are deliverable on any web platform ANYWHERE.
- There are many built-in features to the Blogs at Penn State that make it easy to COLLABORATE on the content development and beyond. If desired, an instructor can integrate the Comments feature for student feedback and conversation on material.
- With the blog platform, especially a university-wide platform, the content is PORTABLE at several levels. At it's most basic, the resulting blog (web) site can be exported in one easy step and provided to another person to import into their own blog (web) site. From that point, the new content owner can edit the content as they see fit.
- Integrate the lesson material with ANGEL. This was an easy requirement to meet because ANGEL allows you to hyperlink to websites with little effort or problem. Additionally, the Biology faculty wanted to utilize ANGEL's assessment feature, of which we used the Drop Box format for the learning assessment.
- Instructionally, put a contemporary context around the material. The Biology faculty wanted to use the current environmental issue of the sudden decrease in the bee population (Colony Collapse Disorder) as a way of adding more meaning and impact to the material to the students' lives.
The Pilot- See It For Yourself
Because we developed the content outside of ANGEL, we are able to provide access to the Biology 12 Flowering Plant Reproduction lab learning material...without forcing you to go through ANGEL first.
To view the course going through ANGEL, I have provided this view. Keep in mind that you have to be assigned to the BIOL12 course, section 001 (as I currently am) to access it. Otherwise, you will not be able to view the content.
Innovations
- Content available via Creative Commons concept. Because the learning content is on the blog platform, the course can be used in an open manner.
- Use of Google Forms to collect feedback during development. During the Alpha and Beta phase of development, we embedded a form on every learning page to collect reviewers' feedback. We created this with the form creation feature in Google Docs. Reviewers could add comments on each screen and they were funneled to a spreadsheet in Google Docs. This eliminated the need for multiple documents being passed around and manually pulled together on the back end.
- Streaming media elements can be reused anywhere on the web. We created narrated animations and interactive exercises in a manner that they can be used independently of each other. Because of this, these objects can be easily integrated into other web platforms (YouTube, other blog platforms, etc.)
- Availability of Comments feature on blog platform. Each learning page in this course can be commented on by anyone taking this course. While we used it only in a limited capacity during this pilot course development, Biology faculty are considering ways to utilize this feature for future use.
Current Outcomes of the Pilot Course
We received course evaluation feedback through a form in ANGEL from students from April 11-17. Overall, the feedback showed that:
- Students generally like this format and found it instructional and easy to navigate
- Plurality of students would like a combination of online and hands on wet labs
- Students would like to see more interactivity in an online lab
Here is the summary data analysis of the course evaluation feedback.
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