Developing General Chemistry II Online - American Chemical Society

Chapter 6

Developing General Chemistry II Online:

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Successes and Challenges of Online Chemistry at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alison R. Noble* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Messiah College, One College Avenue, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055, United States *E-mail: [email protected].

Over the last decade, trends in higher education have led to a significant increase in the number of online courses. While online courses have become common at many community colleges, and major universities have explored teaching through massive open online courses, online or blended programming is becoming common even among smaller institutions with a historical focus on liberal arts and sciences. At Messiah College, we have developed a blended (lecture online, lab on campus) offering of General Chemistry II. In this chapter, I will discuss the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of this approach with attention to various online tools for interacting with students. This includes learning management systems, synchronous video-linked office hours, and virtual mini lectures, as well as challenges in generating a high quality chemistry course in an online format. I will also discuss reported student perceptions of this learning medium compared with a traditional course delivery.

Introduction Online teaching has grown rapidly over the last decade. From community colleges and universities that serve large and geographically diverse student populations, to educational platforms like edX and Coursera that partner with faculty at top universities to develop massive open online courses (MOOCs), the © 2017 American Chemical Society Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Online Learning Consortium now reports that over six million students worldwide are enrolled in online educational programming (1). Why, then, would colleges and smaller universities, many with largely residential and traditional student body populations, and which emphasize a commitment not only to academic excellence but also to some of the more relational aspects of teaching, like faculty-student mentoring or social and character development, want to enter the fray? Does this type of education (residential, historically liberal arts and sciences, primarily undergraduate) translate to the online environment? What are the particular challenges of developing an online course at an institution primarily resourced for residential undergraduates? The motivating factors for course development in this type of educational environment are likely to vary between institutions as well as for individual faculty members. Based on my interactions with colleagues and administrators on campus and across the country, there seem to be two common motivating factors: Serving the changing needs/demands of the student population and adjusting to the current economic paradigm both for students as well as for educational institutions. As a faculty member at an institution with a strong commitment to undergraduate education, my motivation is largely related to serving the changing needs/demands of students – that is, effectively supporting them in reaching their educational goals. One of the main benefits to students is that an online course allows them to get back “on track” in the event that they have fallen out of sequence in general chemistry. General Chemistry I is a challenging course typically taken in the first semester of the first year of college. During that time, students are making a wide range of adjustments both in and out of the classroom; for many of them it is the first time they have lived away from home, adjusted to a roommate, learned to manage their time independently, and confronted the rigors of a challenging college-level science course. Students take different amounts of time to make these adjustments and, invariably, some students will need to re-take General Chemistry I. While not problematic in and of itself, without a catch-up online offering in the summer, students must either find a General Chemistry II course at another institution, which may or may not cover the same material in General Chemistry II as the course at their home institution, or they fall behind an entire year as they are unable to begin the organic chemistry sequence in the fall of their second year. Essentially, setbacks during the adjustment period to college can have a trickle-down impact because of the sequenced nature of the chemistry curriculum. An online offering allows students to catch up within the context of their home institution and without the complexity of transfer courses. Additionally, if the course is taken in the summer, it may also enable a student to focus solely on a single subject, without having to juggle multiple courses at once. Faculty can also have confidence that the full general chemistry curriculum has been covered by one fluid, single-institution sequence. In addition to student need, there is also increasing student demand for the flexibility and asynchronous learning environment offered by online education. Even within a largely residential college setting, students are balancing many obligations including on-campus jobs, off-campus jobs, internships, family responsibilities, and involvement in community service, to name just a few. The widespread use of electronic communication in day-to-day activities translates 72 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


to student openness to online learning as an option that provides the flexibility they desire. This is not to offer a value judgment on student priorities (i.e. should or should they not be looking to “fit education into the rest of their lives in a convenient way,”) but simply an acknowledgement that the student desire to do so exists. Education in America is expensive and primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) are looking for ways to offer quality education to students at lower cost. From both the student side (it keeps costs down) and the institutional side (it keeps students at the institution), online education is attractive. Within this context, I developed an online offering for General Chemistry II online at my home institution, Messiah College, a PUI within the liberal and applied arts and sciences tradition.

Making the Change: Face-to-Face (F2F) to Online Best Practices In the early stages of developing an online platform, I focused on some best practices that had been highlighted at conferences such as the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE), the Division of Chemical Education Sessions at several national ACS meetings, internal resources from the Messiah College Teaching and Learning Initiative, and several articles in the online journal Online Classroom (2, 3). My main foci fell into the following categories: utilizing short and frequent communications, developing an online “presence” to motivate engagement and learning, setting and communicating course expectations (i.e. online doesn’t mean easy), online methods of faculty-student connection, and effective ways to teach calculation-heavy problem solving in an online environment. One of the first talks I attended on online education was at the 2012 BCCE Meeting hosted by Pennsylvania State University. An experienced professor related a rather crushing experience: expecting that recordings of his very popular traditional-format lectures would translate well to an online course, he was dismayed to find that doing so was neither effective nor appreciated in an online setting. In fact, research indicates that video content of any significant length – six minutes or shorter is optimal (4) - can be too long in an online platform. This is an enormous departure from traditional classroom teaching where the lectures are frequently 60 minutes - or even longer. While the content may be the same, an online course is a completely different entity than a traditional course. To address this issue, I utilized a combination of short videos (that I created using my PC), narrated content presentations using VoiceThread (5), problem solving videos that I recorded using a document camera or Google Glass, and discussion boards. The short self-recorded videos were most helpful when introducing students to a new concept or highlighting course logistics (e.g. where to find the syllabus). In addition to communicating important information, the videos also helped establish a sense of presence with the students – they could see and hear their professor talking about chemistry or about their course. These videos were easy to make and 73 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


I used them throughout the term. Student feedback indicated that they appreciated being able to “see” me and I found that instructions given in this format were nearly always followed by the majority of the students in the course. It was through short and frequent annotated VoiceThread presentations that most of the content specifics were delivered. VoiceThread is a cloud application that utilizes Adobe Flash and enables the user to create content, comment on the content (using a microphone, video, text, or audio-file upload), and share the content and comments with a specific group of people – in this case, I shared chemistry content and explanations with students enrolled in the course. Many institutions, including my own, have integrated VoiceThread into their campus Learning Management System, further facilitating its use for educational applications. In a typical communication, I upload visual content to display examples of chemical phenomena while narrating using the video comment feature and drawing tool embedded directly into the VoiceThread application. These mini lectures allowed me to deliver targeted explanations for each of the main concepts in the course. Motivating students to work on problems outside of class was more challenging in an online environment than in my traditional General Chemistry courses. Most experienced chemistry faculty understand that learning chemistry requires considerable time spent (by the student) on independent problem-solving. In a traditional classroom setting, however, I’m able to use relational techniques like humor and enthusiasm to generate student engagement. These relational tools are not available, at least not to the same extent or in the same way, in the online setting. In order to model problem-solving approaches and encourage students towards independent efforts, I used a document camera or Google Glass to record examples of the different types of problems students encounter in each chapter. Based on student performance and feedback, this approach was only partially successful: the videos were effective for modeling problem solving, but they did not seem to generate enthusiasm toward the material. A meta-issue related to recordings that can be a particular challenge for PUIs is that the institutional support for professional-level recordings is typically minimal. All of my videos were self-produced and, while the chemistry content was of high quality, the video quality is amateur. In today’s video-rich environment, the quality of the recording itself can be a detractor to a student population that is saturated with professional media. Some institutions, mine own included, have dedicated capital and personnel resources available for innovations in technology. For faculty engaged in developing and delivering online courses in disciplines where formulae or illustrations of complex phenomena are typically required (e.g. chemistry, physics, mathematics, and technology), it is worth partnering with technology support on campus to acquire tools to support delivery of this type of content. Readily available tools, like a SmartPen, which enables a paired voice-text recording (6), can enable typical educators to generate reasonably high-quality materials for student learning support. One product that requires a bit more institutional support is the Lightboard, an open-source tool developed by Michael Peshkin at Northwestern University (7). The Lightboard is a pane of architectural glass lit with LEDs, such that writing on the board with fluorescent markers will appear bright on the glass. Since the glass is also transparent, it 74 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

allows the educator to establish a presence in the video in a manner similar to what students experience in a traditional classroom by being visible while simultaneously using the board to explain formulae and diagrams. There are some challenges with the Lightboard setup including the necessity of a dedicated recording studio and image reversal (so the writing does not appear backwards in the video), but the utility of the tool makes it worth the investment for PUIs that intend to expand their online presence in these formula-heavy disciplines (8, 9).


What Are Some of the Challenges? The three biggest challenges I encountered in offering General Chemistry II online were the student expectation that online means “easy,” fostering a studentprofessor connection, and giving effective and timely feedback.

Managing Expectations Early The first time I taught an online course, I was surprised by the student expectation that a course offered by the same institution with exactly the same catalog number would, no – should, be easier online than it would be if they took the course in a traditional format. Despite the online course being offered in only half the time as the traditional course, student feedback clearly indicated that they were not prepared to take a challenging course at double the usual pace, but were, in fact, expecting to have a simplified version of the course that other students had taken in a traditional format. At the conclusion of my first online course, one student offered the following in the course evaluation: …too much stress while working a job, very conflicting, same amount of work what [sic] would be done in a normal semester, except course dates are half the time of a normal semester. Could’ve started two weeks earlier and gone two weeks longer. In any format, setting clear expectations at the start of a course is essential for students to succeed and to feel like they were treated fairly in the process of the course. A short online survey of the marketing for online courses reveals that marketing departments – all over the country - are frequently not aligned well with academic departments in the way they communicate student expectations for online learning. Curious about my own students, I looked into some of the marketing materials that were available. One advertisement for 2012 online course offerings paired the following claim overlaid on a picture of young people running down the beach, LIVE and LEARN - You can do it all this SUMMER. Take a road trip, get a cool job, relax on the beach, or get some R&R with friends and family…and still get the academic credits you need! 75 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Certainly, students cannot be held entirely to blame for their perceptions of online education when marketing materials imply that serious academic work will not take serious student dedication. At my institution, our marketing department was fairly receptive to feedback about student experience and I worked with them to put emphasis on the website, as early as when students read a description of the course, that an intensive lab week would be required in addition to 20+ hours of academic work each week. In addition, by the time the 2016 flyer was designed, it had a different ethos – one that still emphasized flexibility but without implying that online courses are trivial. Overlaid on a picture of a young person working on a laptop in an outdoor setting, the flyer emphasizes flexibility (not ease) and reads: Live and Learn - Make the most of your summer and still earn the college credits you need. While messages about online education are coming to students from many different sectors, it is important for academic departments to work together with college or university administrators to help generate appropriate expectations for students. The latest set of feedback from my online students indicates that those efforts, along with extra attention I have given to emphasizing expectations in the first week of an online course, have had a positive effect, with one student reporting, “A lot of information is crammed into a small amount of time, but that is part of it.” When students know what to expect from a course, they are more equipped to be successful in it from the start. While this is not unique to online education, the presupposition that online education is easy makes it particularly important to emphasize expectations when the course is marketed as well as doing so early and emphatically in course materials and professor-student communications. Foster Interpersonal Connections and Establish Faculty Presence In a skill-intensive subject like chemistry, giving effective feedback to students in an online setting can also be challenging. There are, however, a number of tools already available that can largely mitigate the lack of face-to-face feedback. Some of the methods discussed above, such as problem-solving recordings or Lightboard presentations can be collected into a teaching toolbox – a digital repository of reference information for students – and specific items in the toolbox can be linked in communication with students about their work in order to provide feedback when students have not mastered a particular concept (10). Discussion boards can also be invaluable for interactions and for asynchronous feedback. This particular medium enables both professor-student and student-student interactions. Working on challenging coursework requires resilience and can be frustrating for students. In an online environment, this frustration can be compounded by a sense of isolation as well. Discussion boards are an excellent tool to mitigate the 76 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


sense of isolation that can be experienced online, though I recommend a ground rules assignment (typically called “netiquette”) before students begin to interact in this type of format. While there are many effective ways to organize class discussions, for general chemistry I typically create a discussion board specific to each chapter. Students are required to post at least one question and at least one reply before they can proceed in the course – though after the first week or two, the activity on the discussion board is usually much more than one comment per student! Once students become familiar with each other in the course (and the first discussion board is actually a “get to know you” discussion board), the students begin to interact with each other quite naturally and answer one another’s questions, or just commiserate about a difficult concept or exercise. When the students cannot assist one another, I am able to see where the challenging concepts are and step in with a clarifying question, comment, or link to a resource from a teaching toolkit. In addition, because discussion boards are accessible to all students, this format also alleviates the need to answer the same question multiple times; I’ve even started to employ online discussion boards for some of my traditional courses because of the way they facilitate interaction and are an efficient medium for clarifying challenging concepts to multiple students at once. Fostering student-professor or student-student interactions is challenging in an online environment. The discussion boards offer one fairly effective way to establish community in an online learning environment. I have made attempts at offering online office hours as well, but have found it rare that students will show up to the live session. Student feedback indicates that this is largely because live office hours are synchronous – they require the student to be available at the same time as the faculty member is available. This synchronicity is at odds with the student need for flexibility and as a result, online office hours have not been successful in the way I had originally envisioned. I have, however, found that if I hold synchronous online office hours and record them, that students very much appreciate the opportunity to listen later, at a time that suits their schedule, to a recording of the answers to questions other students (who were able to attend in real time) asked. Best practices for fostering connection online also include erring on the side of empathy as well as using regular short announcements, as opposed to infrequent and lengthy communications (11). Students in an online course are often balancing work and family demands as well as navigating the sometimes unreliable world of electronic communications. Being empathetic (reasonably so) establishes rapport with students. Short and frequent posts add to the sense that the professor is engaged in the course without overwhelming the student with too much information at one time. The use of short videos, a Lightboard, and audio recordings can all also contribute to the sense of faculty presence in an online course.

77 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Student Experience: The Pros and Cons…and Is There Still Something Missing? The student experience in any course, online or otherwise, is variable. For the online General Chemistry II course described in this chapter, comparing learning outcomes to my traditional courses is challenging, mainly because the students who take the online course have usually suffered an academic setback which has caused them to be out of sequence in general chemistry (and therefore enroll in the summer online course). Typically, they have either dropped or failed General Chemistry I the first time they enrolled in the class or else placed into a preparatory chemistry class in their first semester of college because they did not have the requisite prior chemical problem solving experience to enroll immediately in General Chemistry I. Therefore, a comparison of learning outcomes between this course and my online course cannot be isolated to the platform because the population of students in the two formats is not the same. With that said, while the average learning outcomes for my online course are not as strong as for my traditional course (perhaps unsurprising given the population difference), there are always a significant number of students who do as well or better in my online course than the average student in my traditional course. For a population of students that are off-track and who have encountered previous academic setbacks, the opportunity to make up the course over the summer and at a lower cost is advantageous academically as well as financially. In terms of the student experience, feedback from the course consistently indicates that students appreciate discussion boards, flexibility, connection to the professor, and timely response to questions. Some direct feedback taken from student evaluations elucidates potential strengths and expectations for online learning:

“[I appreciated]…how involved the professor was throughout the course” “[I liked] …to set my own hours…taking it in the summer” “… Noble was good with responding quickly which I consider important in an online course”

Conversely, students also expressed many of the identified challenges with online learning including:

“Too much work in a short amount of time” “Fast paced” “Having to switch between [multiple platforms]” “…Even though our prof helped us out a lot and was always available to talk with us about questions, I think I would ahve [sic] preferred to take this class in a classroom, rather than online.” “No meeting with the professor” 78 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

This last quote in particular belies something subtle about online learning. Despite significant efforts toward establishing presence in the online environment, students still report that there was no “meeting” with the professor. One quote in particular really captures the idea that there is still something missing, even from a well designed online course (emphasis added):


“…With how much she is willing to help her students in an online environment, I would be very happy to take a course with a lecture period during the fall or spring semesters and experience her teaching firsthand.” I was clearly the instructor for the online course, and the instruction was clearly “firsthand” in that no one other than me was delivering the material. But the student reflection on the course shows that the online platform itself is a kind of barrier to interpersonal connection, a connection that has been shown to be correlated with learning (12). Despite all the communication, tools, videos, and timely interactions on the discussion board, student feedback indicates that there is something human and connecting missing in online courses.

Conclusion Online courses present clear advantages and real challenges. The advantages include flexibility, the opportunity to catch up in sequenced courses, and potential financial savings. The challenges include student expectations regarding course difficulty, perceptions of limited interpersonal connection, challenges in supplying timely feedback, and effective communication of challenging material, especially with material that includes complex formulae, diagrams, and illustrations. An array of tools and resources have been developed which help mitigate many of the challenges, though a notable exception remains the limited human connection between professor and student. As a person trained in the liberal arts and sciences and a faculty member at an institution with a tradition in the liberal and applied arts and sciences, I see this deficiency as anything but inconsequential. That being said, there are situations in which online learning is a valid option and opportunity. In the end, offering (or signing up for) an online course is mainly a question of equipping faculty to mitigate the majority of the drawbacks while enabling students to assess whether the pros of a particular online opportunity outweigh the potential challenges.

References 1.

Allen, I. E.; Seaman, J. Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States. Tenth Annual Report on the State of Online Learning in U.S. Higher Education, Babson Survey Research Group in partnership with the College Board, January 2013, http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf (accessed September 27, 2016). 79 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Kelly, R. From F2F to Online: Getting it Right. Online Classroom 2014, 4, 7–8. 3. Kelly, R. How to Add the Human Element to Online Learning. Online Classroom 2015, 1, 3. 4. Guo, P. EdX Blogs; http://blog.edx.org/optimal-video-length-studentengagement (accessed September 27, 2016). 5. Voicethread information can be found at https://voicethread.com/ (accessed November 23, 2016). 6. A description of a SmartPen can be found at https://www.livescribe.com/enus/smartpen/ (accessed September 27, 2016). 7. Darell, R. Teacher Creates Groundbreaking New Transparent Lightboard. Bitrebels Online Magazine, 2014. 8. Open source Lightboard technology information can be found at http://lightboard.info/ (accessed September 25, 2016). 9. “7 things you should know about Lightboard.” https://net.educause.edu/ir/ library/pdf/ELI7111.pdf 10. Orlando, J. Online Learning 2.0: The Teaching Toolbox. Online Classroom 2014, 5, 4–5. 11. Jones, R. Promoting Learning: The Instructor’s Main Mission or a Secondary Duty? Faculty Focus 2015 October. 12. Kelley, R. How to Add the Human Element to Online Learning. Faculty Focus 2016 February.


2.

80 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Developing General Chemistry II Online - American Chemical Society

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