Creating an Instructor Presence in an Online Course at the Expense of Your TA's Life (A Small Price to Pay)

Details Creating an Instructor Presence in an Online Course at the Expense of Your TA's Life (A Small Price to Pay) Creating an Instructor Presence in an Online Course at the Expense of Your TA's Life (A Small Price to Pay)

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21346204m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #462.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.407

Computer Science

Learning

Scientific paper

Swan and Shih (2005) reported that the perceived presence of an instructor in an online course is influential in determining the satisfaction, if not the performance, of students in the course. To address this issue, we developed a series of 19 videos which not only demonstrate various astronomy concepts, but also provide the students with a voice, face and personality associated with the instructor and teaching assistant. To keep the students' attention throughout the videos, we also included humorous elements which involve the assistant (S. Redman) being injured in every video.
These videos were first used during the Spring 2008 semester, when we taught an online course in introductory astronomy to almost 400 non-science majors at Penn State University. In order to assess the educational value of these videos, we presented identical questions to students of both the online course and a traditional face-to-face course which included Active-Collaborative Learning (ACL) taught by one of us (S. Miller), and received feedback from the online students via questionnaires.
Students ranked our videos as moderately effective at explaining astronomical concepts as well as creating an instructor presence within the course. Compared to the ACL students, the online students performed equally well on questions related to topics covered in the videos. We also found a positive correlation between the effectiveness of the videos in creating an instructor presence and student attitudes towards the course. We discuss our approach to creating these videos, how they were used within an online course, students’ perception of the effectiveness of the videos, and their impact on student learning. You can find them by Googling "Astronomy 001" at video.google.com. We thank Digital Commons of Penn State for their assistance in producing the videos.

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