Strategies used to enhance student accountability and provide immediate feedback
We used different applications and online tools throughout the course to enhance student accountability and course engagement (see Table 1). The course was organized by weeks (16 weeks total during a regular term), each week had two asynchronous lectures and one section activity (i.e. worksheet). At least one of the lectures each week implemented the entire TBL structure (iRAT, tRAT, and Application & Analysis) while other lectures only included the Application & Analysis component. We felt this was important so as not overwhelm the students with multiple team quizzes per lecture. Figure 2 shows how we implemented these components in an asynchronous online environment.
We continued to use pre-lecture individual assignments in the online course (Figure 2). These assignments included readings from an online textbook, short video lectures (5-15 min) describing basic concepts and processes, and a pre-lecture quiz (or an iRAT if the lecture implemented the TBL structure). Regular pre-lecture quizzes did not have a time limit and students had two attempts to answer the quiz. Five questions were randomly selected from a quiz bank each time (quiz banks with 10-30 questions were populated using questions from previous tests). The students had immediate feedback on the answers and tips on how to answer the questions correctly if necessary. Alternatively, iRATs had a time limit of three minutes where the students answered five multiple choice questions. The students only had one chance to answer the iRAT questions and they had no immediate feedback on the answers because they would revisit those questions with their team during the tRAT.
Students could access lectures any time after having completed the pre-lecture assignments. Lectures were similar to a slide show used in face-to-face classrooms, students would open a lecture to browse through an interactive slideshow. In each lecture, we included a combination of images, text, animations, closed-caption videos, voice over slides, and embedded multiple choice questions that were the same as the clicker questions we use in the face-to-face class. We developed these interactive lectures (i.e. interactive storylines) using Articulate Storyline 360 and embedded them in our course management system (Canvas) as an external tool. Making the lectures an external tool allowed us to score the questions embedded in the lectures and provided the students with immediate feedback on each question. Students could only answer the questions once. Question feedback was provided by using several slides explaining the correct answer and a few reasons of why the other answers to the question were incorrect. These interactive storylines gave us the tools to address students’ misunderstandings at an early stage.