High-enrollment Courses Research Articles

Dynamic answer-dependent multiple-choice questions and holistic assessment analysis in high-enrollment courses.

Many 4-year public institutions face significant pedagogical challenges due to the high ratio of students to teaching team members. To address the issue, we developed a workflow using the programming language R as a method to rapidly grade multiple-choice questions, adjust for errors, and grade answer-dependent style multiple-choice questions, thus shifting the teaching teams' time commitment back to student interaction. We provide an example of answer-dependent style multiple-choice questions and demonstrate how the output allows for discrete analysis of questions based on various categories such as Fundamental Statements or Bloom's Taxonomy Levels. Additionally, we show how student demographics can be easily integrated to yield a holistic perspective on student performance in a course. The workflow offers dynamic grading opportunities for multiple-choice questions and versatility through its adaptability to assessment analyses. This approach to multiple-choice questions allows instructors to pinpoint factors affecting student performance and respond to changes to foster a healthy learning environment.

Practical Sentiment Analysis for Education: The Power of Student Crowdsourcing

Sentiment analysis provides a promising tool to automatically assess the emotions voiced in written student feedback such as periodically collected unit-of-study reflections. The commonly used dictionary-based approaches are limited to major languages and fail to capture contextual differences. Pretrained large language models have been shown to be biased and online versions raise privacy concerns. Hence, we resort to traditional supervised machine learning (ML) approaches which are designed to overcome these issues by learning from domain-specific labeled data. However, these labels are hard to come by -- in our case manually annotating student feedback is prone to bias and time-consuming, especially in high-enrollment courses. In this work, we investigate the use of student crowdsourced labels for supervised sentiment analysis for education. Specifically, we compare crowdsourced and student self-reported labels with human expert annotations and use them in various ML approaches to evaluate the performance on predicting emotions of written student feedback collected from large computer science classes. We find that the random forest model trained with student-crowdsourced labels tremendously improves the identification of reflections with negative sentiment. In addition to our quantitative study, we describe our crowdsourcing experiment which was intentionally designed to be an educational activity in an introduction to data science course.

Open Educational Resources and Educational Outcomes at a Community College

Open educational resources (OERs) are an alternative textbook to publisher materials used by colleges and universities. While OERs likely reduce the cost of college for students, research is mixed on the impact of these textbooks on student success in college. The present study utilizes preference score matching (PSM) methodology to compare OER and publisher textbook use to student pass and withdrawal rates from 9 high-enrollment courses taught at the Community College of Baltimore County from fall 2016 through spring 2021. We examined all enrollments in a subclass-match PSM model, and found a significant improvement of 0.153 on the final course grade received by the student, and a significant increase of about 4% for students that received an ABC in courses using the OER, along with a significant decrease of 2.6% in the rate that students withdrew from OER courses. We also examined Pell students in a subclass-match PSM model, and found a significant improvement of 0.331 on the final course grade received by the Pell student, and a significant increase of about 9% for students that received an ABC in courses using the OER, along with a significant decrease of 4.8% in the rate that Pell students withdrew from OER courses.

Personal Impacts of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Experience

The use of undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) has increased in recent years at a number of institutions, especially in active-learning and high-enrollment introductory courses. Currently, there is research demonstrating their benefit to the departments they work in, the students, and the short-term impacts of the experience on the UTAs. However, no study to date has investigated the long-term impacts of the UTA experience on the participants themselves, and a number of studies call for such an investigation. This research sought to fill that gap in understanding by utilizing a Grounded Theory approach to investigate the perceptions of participants who had served as an UTA in the biology department at a large research institution in the upper Midwest. This research found strong consensus among participants that the UTA experience offers overwhelmingly positive personal benefits including improved self-confidence, a sense of personal reward, and a sense of community that resulted from working with faculty members, and the ability to balance and self-regulate a variety of time commitments.

CRISPR in Your Kitchen: an At-Home CRISPR Kit to Edit Genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Used during a Remote Lab Course

ABSTRACTThe use of CRISPR-based experiments in an undergraduate course is appealing because of the ease of editing, and the relevance of CRISPR to current research. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed an in-person lab for a high-enrollment course that allowed students to design and conduct CRISPR editing experiments in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Post pandemic, the lab course moved online, and we lost the hands-on component. We subsequently developed an at-home kit that contained all the necessary materials for students to grow and transform S. cerevisiae with the DNA molecules necessary for CRISPR-Cas9 induced editing. Our at-home kits cost approximately $70 each to produce and were shipped to over 600 students during the 2020 to 2021 academic year. By adding the at-home experimental work to our remote, online lab course, students were able to generate loss-of-function mutants in ADE2 (causing a red color phenotype). Students were able to send edited yeast samples back to campus for sequencing, allowing for characterization of the different mutations that can occur due to CRISPR-Cas9 induced editing. Here, we described the protocol to produce and use the kits and summarized the student experience of using the at-home kit in a large enrollment, remote lab course. These kits provided opportunities to engage students in hands-on experimentation during a remote course and could also be used to reach learners in other domains, such as high schools and outreach programs.

Building Personal Connections to Organic Chemistry through Writing

Organic chemistry courses enroll students from many majors with diverse interests. Although instructors may strive to appeal to these interests by relating course content to real life, it is challenging to intrinsically appeal to students at the personal level, particularly in high enrollment courses like organic chemistry. When students identify personal connections with course content, they may be more interested or motivated to continue learning course content. To help students identify connections, we designed and implemented a writing assignment prompting students to select an organic compound that personally relates to them and write about this personal connection. Herein, we discuss the implementation and evaluation of the assignment. Student feedback survey responses and interviews indicate that the assignment allowed students to identify how organic chemistry is relevant to their lives. We believe the assignment could be effectively implemented at other institutions and in other chemistry courses.

Longitudinal Learning Outcomes from Engineering-Specific Adaptions of Hybrid Online Undergraduate Instruction

Hybrid online delivery, which is also referred to as mixed-mode delivery, utilizes a combination of online content and traditional face-to-face methods which may benefit significantly from specific delivery adaptations for undergraduate engi-neering curricula. Herein, a novel eight-step phased instructional flow with several targeted adaptations is used to accommodate the mixed-mode delivery of STEM curricula is evaluated with a longitudinal study of students afforded these adapta-tions versus those without them. This STEM Blended Delivery Protocol (STEM-BDP) emphasizes scaffolding of analytical procedures along with hands-on prob-lem solving throughout online and face-to-face components equally. Two high enrollment course case studies utilizing STEM-BDP are examined herein, includ-ing an Electrical and Computer Engineering required core undergraduate course and a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering undergraduate course. The details of the STEM-BDP delivery strategies, learning activities, and student perceptions surveys are presented. Student-resolution longitudinal analysis within a controlled study using blinded evaluation indicates that over a five-year period, failure rates have decreased by 63% among students undergoing STEM-BDP while control and alternatives have not demonstrated similar improvements within the same degree programs. 
 Given increasing enrollments within STEM curricula, it is sought to overcome challenges of conventional lecture-only delivery in high-enrollment courses.

Composition and collaboration: Partnering with an academic department to promote information literacy

In 2015, the University System of Georgia began a 3-year collaboration with the Gardner Institute’s Gateways to Completion (G2C) program to help redesign high-enrollment courses to promote student success. One institution selected their English 1102 course for this initiative, and the department partnered with the library to include a mandatory information literacy component. Finding, evaluating, and using sources are integral parts of this course’s learning objectives which connects with the ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. This article details the design, development, and data collected during implementation of a flipped information literacy module in a department-wide course integration.

Does Class Size Matter? An Exploration into Faculty Perceptions of Teaching High-Enrollment Online Courses

ABSTRACT Class size has been a popular topic for decades. There is renewed interest in this topic now with the growth of online learning. Online courses can accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of students in a single course. Very little research, though, has been conducted recently on class size in online courses and the research that has been conducted is mixed. As the demand for online courses increases, so likely will class size. In this exploratory study, we investigated the perceptions and experiences of 37 faculty teaching high-enrollment online courses. In the following article, we report the results of our inquiry, implications for practice, and areas for additional research.

Instructor Attitudes within the SCALE Efficiency Projects

This paper presents the results of interviews with the principal investigators of the current Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments (SCALE) Efficiency Projects. There are six such projects: Spanish, Microbiology, Economics, Math, Chemistry, and Physics. The paper reviews each project individually, summarizes the results, and then discusses some common lessons learned as well as some still open issues. The paper considers satisfaction both from the perspective of the course director/designer and from the perspective of other instructors and graduate teaching assistants. Theevidence appears to show that all of these groups are satisfied with ALN, relative to the prior situation. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether these results would translate to other high enrollment courses.

Integrating Writing into Undergraduate Soil Management Course Enhances Student Learning

Writing could enhance student learning of topics such as soil management while contributing to students’ critical thinking and communication skills, but this has been little studied in high-enrollment and diverse major undergraduate courses in agriculture. We assessed whether writing contributes to student learning and explored challenges and opportunities associated with writing for 2 years in a high-enrollment (75–80 students) undergraduate soil management course. Students wrote a term paper in small groups on a self-selected soil management topic and received feedback from classmates and instructors about 2 weeks before submission. After submission, students answered 10 survey questions ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Across both years, >65% of students reported they learned practical knowledge by writing, whereas 60% recognized they learned more on their topics of interest, which suggests that writing projects can enhance student learning of soil management. About 55% of students indicated they learned more by writing than from readings and lectures (rating >3.3). They also found peer review by classmates (>3.5) and instructor feedback (>4) helpful. Responses among majors did not generally differ. A potential challenge was that students did not always use all available resources. Overall, writing projects can enhance student learning of soil management and exploration of topics of interest.

P167 - Experiential Learning: Community Nutrition Class Field Trip to Rural Community With Associated Program Planning

Objective: Evaluate the impact of a rural community-based experiential learning (EL) project and field trip on upper-division nutrition student knowledge and understanding of challenges and opportunities of healthcare professionals working in a rural community. Target Audience: Faculty, students, and community partners. Theory, Prior Research, Rationale: Experiential learning has been well-documented to enhance student knowledge and professional preparation, but such high-impact activities can be challenging in high-enrollment courses. Descripiton of Course and Curriculum: Undergraduate nutrition students at the University of Kentucky take a two-semester Life Cycle and Community Nutrition course sequence. In Part II of the course, students work in groups to develop a community programming intervention and evaluation plan. For spring 2017, a semester-long project and day-long field trip to rural Whitesburg, Kentucky, was included as part of the course to expose students to real-world challenges and opportunities in such a rural setting. Evaluation: Students completed anonymous surveys (n = 77) at the end of the semester. Survey results indicated that, on a Likert-scale of 1–7 with 1 being completely disagree and 7 being completely agree, students rated “The EL activity helped me to have a better understanding of my role as a community member” as a 5.3 + /- 1.4, “I understand the attitudes of rural communities toward seeking and receiving healthcare” as 5.7 + /- 1.2, and “I am sensitive to the psychological, cultural, and social factors that affect rural patients' health” as a 6.1 + /- 0.9. On a similar scale with 7 being incredibly important, “How important do you think real-life applications are in your college coursework” was rated as a 6.5 + /- 0.9. Conclusions and Implications: Overall, students reported that the EL activity provided real-life application to the course and exposed them to opportunities working as a healthcare provider in a rural setting. Students provided valuable feedback on improvements that could be made to the project and field trip structure, which are being incorporated during the spring 2018 semester. Funding: None.

Assessing the Impact of Reference Assistance and Library Instruction on Retention and Grades Using Student Tracking Technology

Abstract
 
 Objective – To assess the impact of community college academic librarians upon student retention and grades through reference desk visits and attendance in library instruction classes. 
 
 Methods – Student ID data used for this research was collected from students that visited the reference desk to consult about a course-related question or attended a library instruction class for a specific course. After consenting to share their student ID number, the students’ IDs were scanned and uploaded to a Blackboard Analytics data warehouse. A Pyramid Analytics reporting tool was used to query and extract student-level retention and grade data based upon whether the student had visited the reference desk or attended a library instruction class. Chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests were used to discern any statistical difference in retention rates and grades between students that engaged a librarian through reference or instruction and the general student population. 
 
 Results – When comparing fall-to-fall retention for all degree-seeking students, students that visited the reference desk or attended a library instruction class had a statistically higher rate of retention. When comparing fall-to-fall retention within low-retention student cohorts, students that visited the reference desk or attended a library instruction class had higher rates of retention among all low-retention cohorts. Eight of 10 cohorts were statistically higher for library instruction and 6 of 10 cohorts were statistically higher for reference visits. With respect to course grades, only 1 of 5 high enrollment courses showed a higher grade average for students that attended a library instruction class. None of the differences in average grades between students that attended a library instruction class and all students in the five courses were statistically significant. For the impact of a reference visit upon a course grade, all five courses showed a higher average grade average for students that visited the reference desk for a question related to their course than all students in the course. Four of the 5 differences were statistically significant.
 
 Conclusions – The data collected by systematically tracking students that interact with community college librarians suggests that reference desk visits and attendance of library instruction classes both have a positive, statistically significant impact upon student retention. When looking at course grades, the data does not indicate a statistically significant positive or negative impact for library instruction. The impact of visiting the reference desk upon course grades does suggest a strong, statistically significant positive correlation.

Student and Faculty Perceptions of OpenStax in High Enrollment Courses

<p class="3">As public funding for higher education decreases and the cost to students to attend college increases, universities are searching for strategies that save students money while also increasing their chances for success. Using free online textbooks is one such strategy, and the OpenStax College initiative at Rice University is one of the most widely recognized producers of such materials. Through a mixed method approach, this article examines the student and faculty experiences of adopting and using an OpenStax textbook. With 1,299 student participants, it was found that students greatly value the quality, attributes, and the cost of the OpenStax Biology textbook, though minor concerns were raised about its online format. Faculty adoption of a free textbook provides unique opportunities for course redesign and improvement, and the approach employed in this course transformation context resulted in clearly articulated learning outcomes, a fully realized structure in the course’s learning management system, and improvements to instructional practice. The student, faculty, and course benefits of this study offer a compelling argument for the adoption of high quality open education resources (OER) in public higher education contexts.</p>

A series of literature evaluation skill development interventions progressing in complexity

ObjectivesThe aim of this work was to design and evaluate a series of interactive literature evaluation skill development interventions for pharmacy students that progress in complexity. Related goals for this initiative were to design methods for (1) self-assessment of student abilities and (2) conducting a student-led journal club discussion in a high enrollment course. Educational activitiesSeven literature evaluation skills were targeted. Pharmacy students participated in six in-class article reviews, a written article review, a student-led journal club, and a final written exam. Students rated their skills pre- and post-course using an End-of-Course Self-Assessment. A Journal Club Self-Assessment was conducted after the student-led journal club. Both assessments used a five-point rating system of Novice, Developing, Skilled, Facilitating/Leading, and Educating. AssessmentA total of 165 students responded to both the self-assessments. In the Journal Club Self-Assessment, 56% of respondents rated their ability in preparing discussion questions as Skilled, and 32% of respondents stated that formulating discussion questions were the hardest component of the exercise. In the End-of-Course Self-Assessment, 46% of respondents reported “describing study design” as their strongest skill, while 23% reported “identifying ways to improve study design” as their weakest skill. All seven literature evaluation skills had statistically significant improvements (p < 0.001) pre- to post-course. Critical analysisEven after eight carefully constructed exercises with progressing levels of difficulty, all students did not self-assess their ability at the desired level of “Skilled.”

Surprises in the Muddy Waters of High-Enrollment Courses

Based on a previous analysis of student reflection responses, we developed and implemented a hybrid reflection activity that allowed students to choose among a “Muddiest Point” prompt or a “Most Surprised” prompt, or to use both. We examined and coded student responses from two different courses and determined that each prompt elicits different responses and provides unique benefits. As the term progressed, student responses to the Muddiest Point prompt increased and responses to Most Surprised decreased. The Muddiest Point allows students to more directly express where they are struggling in the course, and it allows instructors to see what concepts are most confusing for students. Alternatively, many students used the Most Surprised prompt to express things that were helpful, or in some cases harmful, for their learning process. The affective quality of the response also differed based on the prompt students selected; Muddiest Point responses were more often negative whereas Most Surprised responses wer...

Resolving Bottlenecks: Converting Three High-Enrollment Nursing Courses to an Online Format.

Converting large undergraduate classes from the classroom to online has been an effective way to increase enrollments in high-demand courses in undergraduate education. However, challenges exist to maintaining students' high-quality learning interaction and engagement in large online courses. This article presents a collaborative model between faculty in health sciences and instructional designers to redesign and redevelop three high-enrollment courses to online at Boise State University. Health studies course faculty and eCampus instructional designers conducted this study to reflect the collaborative online course development process at Boise State. The offering of high-enrollment nursing courses met enrollment demand and maintained student retention. Challenges related to instruction were addressed by using a careful course redesign process and continuous improvement. Implications of this educational innovation for health science educators, instructional designers, and lessons learned are provided.

Utilizing Geo-referenced Mobile Game Technology for Universally Accessible Virtual Geology Field Trips

Declining interest and low persistence is well documented among undergraduate students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math in the United States. For geoscience, field trips are important attractors to students, however with high enrollment courses and increasing costs they are becoming rare. We propose in this concept paper that the contextualized learning and engagement of field trips can be simulated by virtual field trips for smart mobile devices. Our focus is on utilizing the geo-referencing capabilities of smart devices within spatially scaled educational games. This technology is increasingly ubiquitous amongst undergraduate students, and consequently is an untapped pedagogical resource. The objective of our games is to give students real-world experience in selected fundamental principles of geology. Set in Grand Canyon, each module features images of exceptional geologic sites illustrating these principles. Students navigate “downstream” using their devices’ GPS and complete at least one interactive activity per location to progress to the next point. Student response to a pilot game suggests that this indeed is a viable method for making geoscience instruction engaging and enjoyable, and hopefully will result in greater motivation to pursue the geosciences.

Student Perceptions of Twitters’ Effectiveness for Assessment in a Large Enrollment Online Course

During the Winter and Spring 2014 semesters students registered in the online offering of Human Kinetics and Recreation 1000 (N=589) were asked to participate in two Twitter events encompassing two of the course’s assessment activities. In each Twitter event, students were required to post, at minimum, one original tweet and respond to another student’s tweet. The use of a tweet feeder widget in the course’s learning management system provided a current summary of the dialogue. An aggregate tool was used to assist with tracking of student tweets for assessment purposes. &#x0D; At the end of the semester students were asked to complete an online survey that sought to ascertain their experience of using Twitter within the course, including its effectiveness as a component of the assessment, and as a means to enhance social presence within the class. The survey also inquired about students’ previous and current Twitter use, and requested recommendations on how to use it in future courses. Results of this survey data indicate students perceived Twitter as an effective means of assessment, and an effective means to integrate social presence in the high enrollment course allowing them to feel more connected to their classmates and the course content. Students suggested several ways micro-blogging could be used in future classes. Implications for the use of Twitter for assessment purposes or as a means to enhance social presence are discussed.

A Low-Maintenance Approach to Improving Retention: Short On-Line Tutorials in Elementary Statistics

The struggle to get weak students to use learning support services plagues virtually all retention programs (Friedlander, 1980; Hodges, 2001; Karabenick &amp; Knapp, 1988; Moore &amp; LeDee, 2006; Simpson, Hynd, Nist, &amp; Burrell, 1997; Webster &amp; Dee, 1998). This study presents a cost-effective form of supplemental instruction (SI), in the form of on-line tutorials, ultra-short digital instruction suitable for high enrollment courses, designed to engage underprepared or poorly motivated students pass their required courses. Participation among the low achievers was 39.3%, improving their exam scores about a half a letter grade over non-users and students in control sections, even without giving course credit for using the SI resource. Surveys reveal what aspects of the tutorials were most effective and valued.