Ecampus Research Fellows

School districts across the U.S. are grappling with a burgeoning demand for K-12 dual language (DL) programs. Although a rich body of research underscores the academic benefits of DL programs for both minoritized and mainstream students (Genesee & Lindholm-Leary, 2021), few studies have explored the preparation of DL teachers (Caldas, 2021). Colleges of Education typically do not offer DL programs to capacitate DL teachers, and among those that do, few offer online programs (USDE, 2015). During the 2019-2020 academic year, the College of Education at OSU initiated an online DL teacher certification program that offered courses bilingually in Spanish and English. With only a handful of DL teacher preparation programs across the US, little has been documented about courses designed to prepare DL teachers broadly, and even less is known about the effectiveness of these DL teacher preparation programs when offered online. The expected outcomes of this study, then, are multifold. Data for this qualitative study will be collected through in-depth interviews with twelve in-service bilingual teachers who have completed OSU’s online DL certification program. Beyond informing improvements to our program, the study will contribute to the field of teacher education by offering other DL teacher educators insights on how to create or update their own online certification programs. Participant responses will also reveal how DL teachers’ ideologies regarding bilingualism and biliteracy are shaped by an online bilingual learning environment. This pilot study will inform future research, grant submissions, and may offer ideas for scaling the program.

Studies in various engineering disciplines suggest that loneliness and isolation resulting from lack of opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction lead to lower student performance and engagement (particularly, among under-represented students) in virtual learning environments compared to traditional in-person courses. The goal of this project is to assess the feasibility of enhancing student engagement as well as conceptual learning via team-based activities in virtual laboratories for foundational electrical engineering courses. We will pilot our project in ENGR 201 (Engineering Fundamentals I), a sophomore-level electrical engineering course offered via Ecampus, typically in the Spring term. The enrollment for the course varies between 20 to 40 students, consisting primarily of students who are unable to accommodate the class hours for the on-campus sections. Our intervention will consist of individual and collaborative laboratory activities, involving pen-and-paper analysis of electrical circuits and software simulation of their operation, and a collaborative discussion activity on a socio-environmental concern in electrical engineering (e.g., unfair mining of minerals for components used in electrical circuits). These activities will be assigned to all students. We will quantitatively and qualitatively measure the impact of these interventions on student performance and engagement in the course via grades and student responses to survey questions. We will summarize our findings to identify best practices to guide future innovations in ENGR 201 and virtual laboratory design for electrical engineering courses in general. We will share our results, as appropriate, via publications and presentations, respectively, in relevant engineering education journals and conferences. We also anticipate that the outcomes of this project will position the principal investigators to better compete for extramural funding e.g., from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Statistics and Research Methods courses are necessary to a holistic education in psychological science (American Psychological Association, 2016). The content of these courses is typically challenging for students, which is exacerbated by the perceived and real difficulty of online learning contexts (DeVaney, 2010; Dunn, 2014; Sizemore & Lewandowski, 2009; Hedges, 2017). Instructors need to adapt pedagogy for these online courses to facilitate student engagement and improve academic achievement. The aim of this project is to determine if a motivational intervention (called a utility value intervention) facilitates competence and motivation in traditionally challenging courses like statistics and research methods. The findings of this study will help to determine whether this easy-to-implement activity is helpful for online students in statistics and research methods courses. If successful, this type of intervention would be relatively easy to scale up for use to improve outcomes in other online courses that are also traditionally perceived as difficult.

While the asynchronous nature of online education is typically considered a key advantage due to the inherent flexibility it provides to students, recent work has begun to challenge this assumption. For example, there is evidence that synchronous interaction in online courses not only encourages students to more fully engage with course activities, but also seems to foster a greater sense of community across learners (and especially so for under-represented students). The proposed research aims to extend this previous work and study student and instructor expectations for content synchronicity levels in OSU Ecampus courses, with a special eye for how these factors might relate to the experiences and success of underrepresented students. In the first phase of this study, we aim to understand (1) student and instructor expectations for synchronous Ecampus coursework across a variety of academic content domains, (2) perceived barriers to synchronous coursework implementation, and (3) any experiences with past implementations of synchronous online coursework. Using this information, in the second phase of this study we will refine the delivery of a current upper-level engineering class (ME 351) that is offered via Ecampus and instructed by the PI. This course will serve as an initial preliminary means of evaluating whether initial student expectations align with attitudes towards actual experiences of synchronicity in Ecampus course delivery. The results of this investigation will not only broadly benefit educators in STEM disciplines, but for OSU specifically, will provide direct insights for how to improve the highly in-demand ME 351 course offering.

From the perspective of a veteran history professor, student engagement is always a concern. History professors aspire to pass on our passion for our subject matter to our students. Because we usually do not receive training in pedagogy while earning our PhDs, we understand this in a non-academic way: that student engagement can include intangible elements such as curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, desire to continue learning in whatever form, a shift in worldview, and increased skills, as detailed below.

The discipline of history arguably rests entirely on a combination of six skills: empathy for past historical actors, a flexible mindset which comfortably embraces ambiguities and contradictions, an enthusiasm for the endless search for contextualizing details, the discernment to see the biases inherent to all kinds of sources from 500-year-old criminal investigations to tonight’s local newscast, meticulous care in citing sources, and a solid grasp of narrative and storytelling. These six elements apply to all levels of historical teaching and scholarship. They further shape this proposal and the goals of this project.

Students struggle to develop these higher-level skills, which also require a great deal of emotional intelligence. This project proposes to guide and encourage them to engage with the past through a narrative and character-based game(s) built into the design of a new online course – HST 451/551 “Crime in History.” I propose to work with instructional design specialists to create this course with a game structure that seeks to use the principles of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to spark students’ motivation and train them in the above six skills.