Breaking barriers, building community i improving student engagement with preparation for studying science by online distance learning
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Ensuring students are sufficiently prepared to start a module can be a problem, while maintaining interest and motivation during a Summer break of several months between modules presents a further challenge. At the Open University, these issues affect both retention and progression across our interdisciplinary level 1 science curriculum. The continued evaluation and development of an online preparatory website for the new, year one module S112 - Science: concepts and practice is reported. Evaluation of the site in 2017-18 showed high levels of student satisfaction with the resources, though very little engagement with the asynchronous forum through which students could contact each other or tutor moderators (Hutton, 2018a). Developing an online learning community can help to improve student success (Calhoun and Green, 2015). Therefore, improvements planned before the October 2018 module start centred on increasing student engagement on the forum: Firstly, tutors moderating the forums were tasked with developing regular, optional scientific tasks to release in order to generate student discussion (Hutton, 2018b). Secondly, following findings by Robson et al., (2018), volunteer peer mentors from the 2017-18 presentation were recruited and trained as “student buddies”, who established their presence on the forum in order to provide non-academic advice and support to prospective students. Student engagement increased markedly prior to the October 2018 module start with a 10-fold increase in the number of students posting on the forum. Tutors who moderated the forums were asked to provide evaluative peer review of student engagement. The clearest emergent theme from this was that students were seeking to establish a study community, rather than obtain subject-specific advice for their preparation. It followed that students engaged best with optional tasks that were “low stakes” in terms of scientific content; these tasks could be related to the module, but mainly provided a vehicle for students to share personal information as part of their community building. Student response to the buddies was positive, with a wide range of questions covering topics including academic preparation in maths, and face-to-face tuition events. Students seemed more willing to ask these questions of the buddies than of the tutor moderators. These findings are supported by Calhoun and Green (2015). The prep site may be one of many complex factors affecting student behaviour, but data for S112 show that registrations at module start increased by 23.5% from 2017 to 2018, and early withdrawals (13 days after module start) dropped by 2%. Future improvements to the prep site prior to the October 2019 start include earlier introduction of the student buddies to encourage questions, and refinement of the optional tasks to reduce the scientific content and increase the potential for students to share information with each other. Our results provide ideas for building online student engagement, potentially building confidence and resilience for when a module starts. These findings could apply to a number of Higher Education Institutions seeking to help students successfully bridge gaps in study, whether face-to-face or online.
Source: Figshare
Authors: Christopher Hutton (17200690), Julie Robson (16227554)
Language: English
Topic: Online and Blended Learning
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6963680770