Asynchronous Choice of Topics‐ an Adventure in Classroom Instruction

Abstract

Student-led learning has often shown to be beneficial to the learner. These self-directed experiences are more often aimed at an activity/assignment level of instruction, allowing students to explore topics personally through inquiry. With the shift to online instruction caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to take student-led instruction to the curricular level. This fall semester, I employed a “Choose your own adventure” approach to instruction, giving students the ability to tackle subjects in the order they chose to rather than the order determined by the instructor or the book. In preparing for the fall semester, I focused on redeveloping my undergraduate non-major physiology course in a way that allowed students the most flexibility- fully asynchronous presentation. The move to an asynchronous teaching model required the creation of activities and presentations that students could attend to on their own schedule. While creating these resources, I decided to make the class even more asynchronous by allowing students to choose the path of learning that they took through the course. Following a short introduction and review module, students were allowed to choose the order that they would cover material in the course during three “blocks” of information; each with its own quizzes, activities and an exam. Following each block, I asked students why they chose that section, whether they would alter their study habits for the next block of material and a series of Likert-scale questions addressing aspects of their comfort, motivation and learning. At the end of the course, I asked students if they had approached the class differently than traditional courses, whether they would rearrange the material within each block and whether they would like to have additional courses taught in this method.