Description:

Abstract: Penn State World Campus is the home campus of thousands of adult learners each year doing their degrees online from all over the United States and from many international locations. Since 2018, we started offering our introductory physics calculus sequence at the world campus. The courses are taught asynchronously with optional live meetings to accommodate learners with full/part time jobs and family duties. In this talk, I will discuss the course design and how we tackled the two biggest challenges of 1) engaging students with each other and the instructional team and 2) delivering high quality labs done at home with asynchronous instructional support. I will discuss the synergy about innovation in online and residential classes where we have, for example, started to use the iOLab in a studio (SCALE-UP) environment. We believe the courses are working well with learning gains on the FCI of g ~ 0.5, very positive student feedbacks and evidence of cohort and group friendship among students. I will discuss an ongoing research project related to the lab component of the courses and discuss some lessons learned from COVID-19 and how it affected our classes. 

Seminar Speaker: Louis Leblond, Penn State

Meeting Details:
Monday, January 25, 2021 at 2:00 pm (Central Time) on Zoom.

Zoom info:
Please email yassaman.shemirani@northwestern.edu if you would like access to the Zoom meeting link.