The 2021 JoVE Science Education and Research Innovation awards have paved the way for a series of blog posts highlighting how science educators, researchers, and librarians around the world have used visual resources to support their remote efforts. We hope these blog posts will be useful for finding effective answers to the questions imposed while juggling between online or hybrid formats.
This blog post highlights the 2021 JoVE Innovation in the Instruction Award-winning entry by Dr. Claudia Jorgensen, Associate Professor at Utah Valley University in the United States, and her experience in transferring a Behavioral Neuroscience course from face-to-face to completely remote.
Claudia introduced a variety of methods to implement best practices, such as building an online community for students, introducing asynchronous learning, using engaging content, creating a collaborative learning space, and more, to enhance the learning experience for the course. While implementing these methods, she also introduced performance measurement scales which would help her determine their effectiveness and even improve them over time. For this, Claudia asked students to provide ratings about each course they were enrolled in at the end of each semester, called student ratings of instructions (SRIs). In these SRIs, the students rated each course on various aspects, including collaboration. One particular goal she had in mind when developing this course was to make the course collaborative. One big parameter to determine the success of the course was student ratings specifically based on the collaborative aspects of instruction. Another parameter was to actually see the collaboration take place-something that OneNote allows seeing.
In addition to rating various aspects of each course on the SRIs, the students were also asked to share written feedback. These open-ended comments proved to be very meaningful for Claudia, helping her gauge her instruction’s effectiveness. Claudia’s long-term goal is to polish her delivery methods and have this online course available for students who cannot take the course face-to-face and can still meet the graduation requirement by taking this course even post-pandemic.
Request a complimentary recording of our webinar “Moving traditionally in-person science courses online” to hear from Claudia as she discusses her innovative solutions for transferring her Behavioral Neuroscience course from face-to-face to completely remote.