Abstract
It is vital for online educators to know whether the strategies they use help students gain twenty-first-century skills like creativity. Unfortunately, very little research exists on this topic. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine whether participation in online courses can help students develop creativity using asynchronous online discussions, textbooks, and teacher developed materials. A case-study approach was used and one professor, recognized by her peers for her expertise in online education, and three of her students were interviewed. Asynchronous online discussions (29) were also collected and analyzed using a sequential process of building an explanation, checking the explanation against the data, and repeating the process. Key results from the study indicated that project-based prompts, problem-based prompts, and heuristics used in asynchronous online discussions can help promote creativity. Future research should explore a more diverse group of participants and academic subject areas.
Highlights
It is vital for online educators to know whether the strategies they use help students gain twenty-first-century skills like creativity
Little research has been done to ascertain the outcome online classes have on the creativity of students who take online classes
We describe a case study (Yin, 2014) that focuses on answering the question of whether asynchronous, online discussions can be used to improve creativity
Summary
It is vital for online educators to know whether the strategies they use help students gain twenty-first-century skills like creativity. The purpose of this study was to determine whether participation in online courses can help students develop creativity using asynchronous online discussions, textbooks, and teacher developed materials. Asynchronous discussion boards are often a central component of the courses (Cho & Tobias, 2016; Gao et al, 2013) along with teacher developed materials and textbooks. There is little research on the use of asynchronous discussion boards to help students develop creativity. It is important to determine whether student use of asynchronous online discussions, textbooks, and teacher developed materials can help students to develop creativity. Creativity, as conceptualized through Amabile, 1983, 1988; Amabile & Pillemer, 2012) componential model of creativity, is examined
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