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.