Results From Penn State's Interactive, On-line, Scifi Version Of Astro 001

Details Results From Penn State's Interactive, On-line, Scifi Version Of Astro 001 Results From Penn State's Interactive, On-line, Scifi Version Of Astro 001

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.0609p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #06.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.737

Computer Science

Multimedia

Scientific paper

We present results from a new, fully on-line astronomy course for undergraduate non-science majors at Penn State that was offered for the first time in Spring 2007 to 422 enrolled students. The entire course content is conveyed through an interactive story, capitalizing on the many multimedia astronomy resources publicly available on the Internet. The four units of the course (Basic Astronomy and the Nighttime Sky, Our Solar System, Stars and the Milky Way Galaxy, and Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology) deliver the same content as a traditional Astro 001 course. Each unit follows the educational adventure of a different fictional Astro 001 student who has been "abducted" by aliens. The four units are united by a character, the Riddler, who poses riddles about various aspects of astronomy, and whose identity and purpose is revealed gradually as a reward for completion of various subtopics.
The initial Spring offering of the course was entirely web-based except for traditional evening in-class exams. We were very successful: it was popular with the students, the exam grades were about 10% higher than usual, and enrollments in Fall 2007 (more than 700 students) and Spring 2008 (almost 200 pre-enrolled to date) are strong.
Future plans are underway to broaden the audience to students attending other Penn State campuses and perhaps to adapt the course for presentation as an astronomy unit to middle or high school students.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from STScI IDEAS grant HST-ED-90284-01-A

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