Traditional large lecture classes and existing online courses are fundamentally passive and teacher-centered.  Research tells us that this mode of instruction is not ideal for student learning.  Unique attributes of the online environment have thus far been underutilized.  We hypothesize that new tools and innovative curricula they enable can foster greater student engagement and enhance learning at large scale. To test this hypothesis, over the past three years, Arizona State University developed and offered Habitable Worlds, an online-only astrobiology lab course.  The course pedagogy is organized around a term-long game-inspired project in which each student must find and characterize rare habitable planets in a randomized field of hundreds of stars using concepts learned in the course.  The curriculum allows us to meaningfully integrate concepts from physical, chemical, biological, and social sciences in order to address questions related to the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  The pedagogy motivates students to master concepts, which are taught through interactive and adaptive inquiry-driven tutorials, featuring focused feedback and alternative pathways that adjust to student abilities, built using an intelligent tutoring system (ITS).  Through the combination of the project and tutorials, students construct knowledge from experience, modeling the authentic practice of science.  Because the tutorials are self-grading, the teaching staff is free to dedicate time to more intense learner-teacher interactions. The ITS provides robust data and analysis tools that allow us to investigate how students interact with the exercises.  These data have allowed us to identify and fix hidden problems in the exercises that students do not vocalize.  More importantly, the ITS provides the opportunity to construct and evaluate hypotheses in content presentation and evaluation methods that are not possible in traditional classroom settings. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the NSF (DUE 1225741) for support of this project.

Transforming the online course

248th National Meeting (2014)

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