Astr 5 Online
This semester, I taught one section of Astr5 asynchronously online.
The course content is presented in weekly modules. Each module contains a group of assignments that repeats weekly and are always due on the same days of the week, plus an additional assignment. The additional assignments include worksheets, discussion forums, data analysis activities, or midterms.
In my experience, students who choose online over in-person courses enjoy self-paced and self-directed work. To accommodate this, I require the textbook for the online class and provide a weekly reading outline. The outline serves as a study guide and a source of supplemental material, usually in video format. Lecture videos and slides are also posted each week, and are very similar in content to the in-person lectures.
Similar to the in-person preps, this online course has weekly multiple choice quizzes, three larger midterms, and a cumulative final. I am interested in exploring different modes of evaluation in future iterations of this course. In particular, I would like to replace at least some exams with writing assignments.
The constructive criticism I received during the evaluation of this prep was to add more student-student and student-professor interactions. After receiving this feedback, I increased the frequency of announcements advertising on-campus events such as the Adopt-A-Telescope program and the recent Astr 99 student showcase at the planetarium. I also developed more discussion type activities and made sure to add a post and responses of my own. I could always participate more in the discussions, making sure to check in more than once per day to add another post or response. I am interested in incorporating more group projects in the future.
Syllabus
ASTR5-25638-ManzanoKing,C.pdfModules
Material is presented in weekly modules, which are published on Sundays. The layout of a typical module is shown to the right.
The week's material begins with an overview, which briefly introduces the topic and lists tasks, applicable SLOs, assignments, and due dates. An example of a weekly overview is shown below.
Under the "Resources" tab, students will find the materials for that week's lesson. The Reading Outline is a brief overview of the assigned reading for the week. It walks students through the chapter, highlighting key points and providing extra video content not found in the book. Lecture videos and slides are posted in this section as well.
Tasks for the week are presented in the following section. The assignments indicated by the red box appear each week and most are designed to accompany the assigned reading. Each week, I include an activity. In this sample, the activity is a discussion about the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea.
Selected Lectures
Cratered Worlds
Reading Outline 5_ Asteroids, Impacts, and Cratered Worlds_ ASTR-5-16-25638.202220.pdfDeaths of Stars
Reading Outline 10_ Deaths of Stars_ ASTR-5-16-25638.202220.pdfRelativity and Time Travel
Reading Outline 12_ Relativity and Time Travel_ ASTR-5-16-25638.202220.pdfAssignments
Reading Assignments
Each weekly reading is accompanied by the following three assignments. The Before-Reading Warm-Up, Reading Quiz, and Three Questions. The reading quiz is a short, multiple choice quiz with no time limit and unlimited attempts. The style and content of these reading quizzes is the same as the weekly quizzes I give in my in-person preps.
Example descriptions and rubrics for the Warm-Up and Question assignments are detailed below.
Discussions
At least every other week, I post a discussion topic. Some sample discussions were show last year and can be found here.
Activities
When introducing the concept of planetary geology, I assign an activity that demonstrates how impact craters are used to estimate the age of a surface. In this activity, students are provided satellite images of various regions Martian surface and are asked to estimate the ages of each. The activity is presented as a Canvas quiz and involves using a Google Doc to show their work. Students did well on this assignment overall, though I would like to add more short answer questions to make sure they are understand the motivation behind this activity.
Exams and Survey
Midterms
The material covered in Astr 5 logically breaks down into 4 units:
Celestial Motion, Light, and Telescopes
Solar System
Stellar Life Cycle
Galaxies and Evolution of the Universe
These units are punctuated by 3 midterms, each with 60 multiple choice questions. The final is cumulative but focuses on material covered in the 4th unit. Online midterms are included with the rest of the work in the module, and are due on Saturdays at 11:59pm. Students are able to start the midterm at any point during the week but are given one attempt and 90 minutes to complete the exam once it's opened. The questions on these exams are very similar to the exams given in lecture, so please refer to this section for examples. The main difference is the online exams are longer, to account for more relaxed test rules, described below.
When I first began teaching online, I used Proctorio to administer online tests. This caused a lot of technical complications and I eventually did away with proctoring software once I learned about the equity concerns this approach raises. These tests are open-book and open-note but collaborating with other students during a test and searching answers online are prohibited. I have no reasonable way of enforcing these limitations, but in the test instructions, I remind students that going down this path can only lead them astray. An example of the text provided before a test is shown below.
Midsemester Survey Results
Following my first evaluations, I published an ungraded midsemester survey. It consisted of 5 questions that asked about course organization, accessibility of material, and interactions. In short, the feedback that I received from students echoed the suggestions made by my evaluator. The consensus was that the course is organized, workload is manageable, and the course material is accessible.
One area for improvement is the opportunities for interactions between students. Since I received this feedback after my course evaluation, I incorporated more discussion type assignments in each module and made sure to make more frequent announcements. I could further improve the interactivity of the course by introducing group projects.
Survey questions and responses
Is the course organization clear to you? What could be improved?
The course is very clear. Maybe include more class discussions
Yes, the course is very clear. The Professor communicates very well. The syllabus was very detailed and understanding.
I believe the course is very clear of what is expected of you and what is supposed to be done.
It is very clear and I understand where everything is.
All material has been laid out very clearly.
The course is definitely clear, compared to certain other online classes especially those at the start of covid way back when this is perfectly fine
The materials is clear and organized very effectually, I know what I will be dealing with every week.
Approximately how much time are you spending on class work? Does this seem to be manageable?
I usually spend about 1-2 hours to complete all the weekly assignments in one shot. This course is very manageable which I highly appreciate.
The class work is very manageable. I spend at a few hours a week.
I think the classwork is fair, in my opinion you're able to manage well with others courses if you're taking more than one. I spend at least 2 hours.
The class work is very manageable. I tend to spend around 3 hours near the beginning of the week and couple minutes at the end to refresh my knowledge.
I spend about 6 to 8 hours a week on classwork. This is manageable.
Personally I spend usually when I do all the class work around an hour a day over the Thursday Friday and Saturday, or sometimes 2-3 hours on Friday and Saturday if I've mismanaged time, seems perfectly manageable its just down to me being smart with my time which I'm not
around 7 hours and it is manageable because of the due dates that help.
Are you able to access all course materials? Do you have any suggestions for making materials more accessible?
I am able to access all materials, but the textbook was a little tricky to find and somewhat expensive to other books for my classes.
Yes, I was able to access the materials with no problems.
The course material is all accessible, I haven't ran into any problems.
I able to easily access the course materials without a problem.
It is all very clear and easy to access
All the materials are accessible, as the first thing I thought of was if someone doesn't have internet but it's an online class so no, other than that maybe the book is the only thing that we had to get but that was easy to source other than price.
im able to access all course materials
Have you been able to get to know other students in the course? Would you like more support in getting to know others (e.g., to form study groups)?
I have not really seem able to get to know other students besides the discussion boards. Personally I am not a fan of study groups, I am very reserved and like to work independently.
Only during the interaction with group discussions but not outside of school. I am not really at this time interested in getting to know others at this time. However, I would like to know just details should I want to join a study group.
I don't think there was a lot of interaction between classmates, there were few discussion boards and I feel that we weren't collaborating or connecting as much as I had hoped for this course. I feel like the interactions should be more and I think more discussions boards should be added.
I got to know more about people's connection to space through discussion posts and I think the amount of discussion posts are the right amount.
The online class format makes it difficult to connect with other students. It might be nice to get to know the others but that is difficult based on the asynchronous format of the class.
Not really, you get some of their personality in the discussion posts but that depends on if they even put their personality in it, but no I don't really care for meeting and getting to know others unless its an in person class.
I haven't but I don't feel alone because of the discussions
How comfortable do you feel participating in the class? Is there anything that the instructor could do to encourage more equitable participation among all of the students?
I feel very comfortable in class participation.
I felt very comfortable with participating in the class. I feel that I had a great professor who was very easy to communicate to and responded promptly. Thank you
I feel very comfortable participating, because I like the privacy of my work in some aspects like the questions or prior knowledge of the material. It allowed me to be fully honest and help me to express my true knowledge rather than lie or be discouraged I didn't know everything in the material.
I feel pretty comfortable with participating in class. I cannot think of anything about encouraging more equitable, so it is good so far for me.
I do not believe so.
Yeah the participation is fine I've never felt weird about participating in any online class with discussion posts, the zoom call classes are different I hate those but this is fine for me
In this class it was easy to participate, you set it up in a way where we have to talk to others and I don't mind It
Sample Student Work and Feedback
Discussions
Early in the semester, I exclusively left private feedback when grading student discussions. After receiving the suggestion that I interact more, I started leaving discussion posts and responding to at least 2 posts, as if I were completing the assignment as well. Some examples of these interactions are shown below:
disc feedback.pdfThree Questions
I got the idea for this assignment from my undergraduate, upper division Mechanics class, where our professor would ask us to submit three questions from the assigned reading. The questions added a level of accountability that I didn't experience with normal reading assignments, and it forced me to read more carefully to come up with thoughtful questions. It was one of the most memorable assignments from my undergraduate education and is now my favorite assignment to grade. The questions the students ask paint a vivid picture of what they are retaining from the reading, what they are interested in, and what topics I should focus on next. They also give me great ideas for discussion topics for future preps. It can be very time consuming but I enjoy putting as much thought into my responses to these questions as the students put into asking them.