DO ONLINE COURSES SUPPORT STUDENT SUCCESS? A CASE STUDY OF AN INTRODUCTORY PHYSICAL GEOLOGY LAB COURSE

We generally assume that our online courses support inclusivity as they suit students’ diverse needs for accessibility or flexibility of time and location. However, over the last two academic years, we have observed that students enrolled in asynchronous online (OL) sections of our introductory physical geology laboratory course collectively averaged lower grades (~6.2%) than their peers in face-to-face (F2F) sections. If student success varies between delivery modes, do our OL sections truly present equal access to opportunities and resources afforded in a F2F classroom?

The similar content in our F2F and OL sections provides us with an opportunity to evaluate this performance gap between modalities and investigate whether they meet our expectations of inclusivity for student success. We look at three bases for comparison supported by previous work contrasting F2F and OL courses: learner characteristics, learner choices, and curriculum modifications.

Institutionally-collected and student-submitted race, gender, age, academic rank, and major comprise our learner characteristics. While we find no significant enrollment differences in race or gender between delivery modes, OL sections do tend to have more upperclassmen and fewer STEM majors, but these differences do not significantly affect performance. Learner choices like the submission of incomplete work are more prevalent in OL sections than F2F, but OL sections still show lower grades than F2F, on average, when blank work is removed from analysis. The F2F curriculum was modified for OL settings to reduce the cognitive load for students and graders, but as a result also generally reduced the level of inquiry in our labs. Inquiry is related to interest and engagement, which can influence students’ help-seeking behaviors.

Our OL labs lack the immediacy of social support that is more common in F2F settings. The absence of this potential collaboration and lab activities that require more troubleshooting may contribute to the lower student performance in OL sections. This research challenges us to make changes that retain the independence often desired in an OL course without sacrificing the social support critical for learning, through means like virtual check-ins, group assignments that ladder student work, and opportunities for self-reflection.