GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, PERIMETER COLLEGE GEOLOGY PART I: INNOVATIVE ONLINE GEOLOGY COURSE TEMPLATE FEATURES, IMPLEMENTATION AND STUDENT PERFORMANCE

As of 2020, the demand for online courses has dramatically risen leading to closures of on-campus course offerings. On-campus faculty are now required to teach in the asynchronous online modality with little experience of online instruction. In an effort to maintain consistency among instructors new to online teaching, those familiar with online teaching and new hires necessary to meet the new asynchronous teaching load demand, we have developed two online instructional templates for Introduction to Geology I (i.e. Physical Geology) lecture and lab courses within our learning management system (LMS), D2L Brightspace. Our course design aims to improve student success, maintain academic rigor and academic honesty while increasing student sense of belonging (diversity, equity and inclusion) and instructor presence. Course content is delivered incrementally with multiple checkpoint opportunities for students to test their material comprehension before advancing to new material. Use of intelligent agents, scientist spotlights, messages from former students, regular and substantive interaction (RSI), video updates from faculty and implementation of the FLEX grading system will be discussed. Templates were used exclusively in all online sections of Introduction to Geology I lecture and lab between summer semester 2021 through summer 2022 (four semesters) rendering all variables constant with the exception of the students themselves. Active students working at the recommended pace performed well and expressed high satisfaction in the end-of-course survey. We conclude that using a standardized template for online geology instruction provides an effective way for new and experienced classroom faculty to focus on student engagement without the burden of developing their own online course materials.