Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware

As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to e...

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Autores principales:	Marshall P. Thomas, Selen Türkay, Michael Parker
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Athabasca University Press 2017
Materias:	assessment feedback affect confusion online course design Special aspects of education LC8-6691
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/2795a7cf5f644e368770ba4b6f3e40d7
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:2795a7cf5f644e368770ba4b6f3e40d72021-12-02T17:00:16ZExplanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware10.19173/irrodl.v18i7.30761492-3831https://doaj.org/article/2795a7cf5f644e368770ba4b6f3e40d72017-11-01T00:00:00Zhttp://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3076https://doaj.org/toc/1492-3831As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design choices and to measure the effects of these choices on students’ subjective experiences (engagement, mind wandering, and interest) in addition to objective learning outcomes. Using randomized controlled trials, we studied the effect of varying instructional activities (namely, assessment and a step-through interactive) on participants’ learning and subjective experiences in a lesson drawn from an online immunology course. Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results showed that participants were more likely to drop out when they were in conditions that included assessment. Moreover, assessment with minimal feedback (correct answers only) led to the lowest subjective ratings of any experimental condition. Some of the negative effects of assessment were mitigated by the addition of assessment explanations or a summary interactive. We found no differences between the experimental conditions in learning outcomes, but we did find differences between groups in the accuracy of score predictions. Finally, prior knowledge and self-rated confusion were predictors of post-test scores. Using student behavior data from the same online immunology course, we corroborated the importance of assessment explanations. Our results have a clear implication for course developers: the addition of explanations to assessment questions is a simple way to improve online courses. Marshall P. ThomasSelen TürkayMichael ParkerAthabasca University Pressarticleassessmentfeedbackaffectconfusiononline course designSpecial aspects of educationLC8-6691ENInternational Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, Vol 18, Iss 7 (2017)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	assessment feedback affect confusion online course design Special aspects of education LC8-6691
spellingShingle	assessment feedback affect confusion online course design Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Marshall P. Thomas Selen Türkay Michael Parker Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware
description	As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design choices and to measure the effects of these choices on students’ subjective experiences (engagement, mind wandering, and interest) in addition to objective learning outcomes. Using randomized controlled trials, we studied the effect of varying instructional activities (namely, assessment and a step-through interactive) on participants’ learning and subjective experiences in a lesson drawn from an online immunology course. Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results showed that participants were more likely to drop out when they were in conditions that included assessment. Moreover, assessment with minimal feedback (correct answers only) led to the lowest subjective ratings of any experimental condition. Some of the negative effects of assessment were mitigated by the addition of assessment explanations or a summary interactive. We found no differences between the experimental conditions in learning outcomes, but we did find differences between groups in the accuracy of score predictions. Finally, prior knowledge and self-rated confusion were predictors of post-test scores. Using student behavior data from the same online immunology course, we corroborated the importance of assessment explanations. Our results have a clear implication for course developers: the addition of explanations to assessment questions is a simple way to improve online courses.
format	article
author	Marshall P. Thomas Selen Türkay Michael Parker
author_facet	Marshall P. Thomas Selen Türkay Michael Parker
author_sort	Marshall P. Thomas
title	Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware
title_short	Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware
title_full	Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware
title_fullStr	Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware
title_full_unstemmed	Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware
title_sort	explanations and interactives improve subjective experiences in online courseware
publisher	Athabasca University Press
publishDate	2017
url	https://doaj.org/article/2795a7cf5f644e368770ba4b6f3e40d7
work_keys_str_mv	AT marshallpthomas explanationsandinteractivesimprovesubjectiveexperiencesinonlinecourseware AT selenturkay explanationsandinteractivesimprovesubjectiveexperiencesinonlinecourseware AT michaelparker explanationsandinteractivesimprovesubjectiveexperiencesinonlinecourseware
_version_	1718382199588257792

Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware

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