ACTIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES USING COMMON LMS AND ZOOM-EMBEDDED TOOLS IN INTRO AND ADVANCED GEOSCIENCE COURSES TO PROMOTE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT, AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Sars-CoV-19 presented many challenges for educators, especially to geoscientists who engage in the use of collaborative, lab and field-based strategies to motivate and engage students to achieve student-learning outcomes. As a result, of CoV-19 The Chronicle of Higher Education reported nearly 96% of colleges across the U.S. forced faculty to move on the fly to fully-online, or to hybrid delivery this fall. With limited ed tech experience many faculty self-reported, via education-based social media including Pandemic Pedagogy on Facebook, their struggles to find strategies to deliver course content and ideas to motivate and promote student interaction to replace traditional face-to-face high-impact practices. In this new era of forced adoption of tech, many faculty streamlined course delivery to keep things as simple as possible and many chose asynchronous delivery to provide as much flexibility as possible for students. Unfortunately, the result was that many (especially inexperienced and extrinsically motivated) students were ill prepared to engage online. Students reported “Zoom-fatigue” and higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. One study stated that 42% of students reported difficulty staying motivated in online courses and many dropped out as undergraduate enrollments fell by ~2.5% nationwide. This affected low-income students who disproportionally experienced a “digital opportunity gap” and many faced anxiety about internet/computer access, loss of campus housing, etc. Despite these negatives, given the resources colleges invested in pandemic technology, it is likely that technology-delivered classes are here to stay. It is critical for geoscience faculty to improve student engagement utilizing active learning approaches going forward. This presentation will focus on strategies/tools embedded in most LMS’s (discussion boards, surveys, whiteboards, etc.) and Zoom tools (i.e. breakout rooms, Zoom channels/chats, non-verbal communication tools, polls, screen-capturing, etc.) employed in both intro non-majors and advanced geoscience classes to promote engagement. Moreover experiences using digital microscope cameras, screen-capturing software in synchronous course delivery, and faculty-moderated asynchronous group project workspaces will be shared.