UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF ONLINE DYNAMIC EARTH COURSE DURING COVID-19

The study investigated geoscience students’ experiences with online education during the COVID-19 pandemic at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the US. We used an existing survey from the online education literature, Online Learning Environment Survey (OLES) composed of three instruments: (a) Community of Inquiry (CoI) consisting of the subscales of Teaching Presence (TP), Social Presence (SP), and Cognitive Presence (CP), (b) Institutional Support (IS), and (c) Self-Directed Online Learning Scale (SDOLS) consisting of the subscales of autonomous learning (AUL) and asynchronous online learning (AOL). The OLES was administered to students taking an online dynamic earth course over multiple semesters: summers 2019, 2020, and fall 2020. The survey data were used to run two sets of analyses: (a) descriptive statistics analyses and (b) Rasch modeling analyses. Per the descriptive statistics analyses, the survey rating subscales from highest to lowest order were AUL, AOL, IS, TP, SP, and CP, respectively, indicating that approximately 85% to 65% of the responses were in favor of the online learning environment. Among all the subscales, the asynchronous online mode was the most favored category by the students. Based on Rasch modeling analyses, asynchronous online teaching could be a favorable course delivery technique for geoscience education. Overall, the survey data shows a general interest in the online delivery of geoscience courses and the effectiveness of this modality, indicating potential for online geoscience programs. Finally, there are possible extensions of the study for future research, such as extending the research to other introductory online geoscience courses.