Conclusion
Overall, TBL enhanced the student experience in our online course. Our experience showed not only that students participated actively in the course but also acquired high performance levels. This was especially demonstrated when we transitioned our face-to-face class to online teaching in the Spring of 2020. To our surprise all of our students not only completed our course (despite the opportunity to withdraw without penalty) but also did very well – only two students had final grades below 70% and none failed the course. In addition, discussions and assessments demonstrated that students had a clear understanding of fundamental evolutionary topics.
Students reported the usefulness of teamwork but found scheduling meeting times a challenge and an added stressor, which underscores previous research on online courses with team work components (Palsolé & Awalt, 2008; Goh & Gunnells, 2020). We recommend requiring teams to set weekly meeting times at the start of the term. Other online courses that implemented TBL opted for only asynchronous team discussions (e.g. Palsolé & Awalt, 2008). However, we found that synchronous team discussions in our online course had components usually associated with enhanced sense of belonging and accountability. We suggest that online courses continue assessing the role of synchronous and asynchronous discussions in different student populations. Overall, our experience transitioning to online learning during the pandemic confirmed that the use of TBL strategies and teamwork can help increase student engagement, equity, and accountability in online life science courses.