By engaging with students through the virtual screen during the College’s first massive online open course, “Introduction to Environmental Science,” environmental studies professor and course lead Andrew Friedland said that he and his team frequently found themselves surprised by the universality of environmental science, despite students’ varied perspectives.
“For a certain problem, for example, [the question] asked students to tell us about a typical meal and the energy subsidy, so it was applying environmental concepts we learned to their own meal,” Friedland said. “We learned about chicken and rice from northern Iran, fish from Indonesia, foods from West African nations and all around the world.”
The course, which began on Feb. 3, invited 10,306 students from 168 countries to join the conversation on the natural world. The six-week course launched on edX, a non-profit education website started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Friedland said the course was modeled after “Introduction to Environmental Science,” a class that he has taught at the College for more than 25 years. The material focused on biodiversity, energy and global change, appealing to a global burgeoning interest in studying the natural world.
“For me, it was a very exciting experience,” Friedland said. “I had to take what I knew about teaching and turn it inside out and upside down. It was professionally challenging and rewarding.”
In developing the course, Friedland teamed up with instructional designer in educational technologies Michael Goudzwaard, associate director of Dartmouth’s media production group Mike Murray, director of digital learning at Dartmouth Center for Advancement of Learning Josh Kim and the director of digital resources and scholarly communication programs, as well as both graduate and undergraduate students.
With an average rating of five stars and 169 reviews on Coursetalk, a site where users can review MOOCs, the class attracted students from around the world. While the largest numbers of students came from the United States, the United Kingdom and India, enrollments also came from Indonesia, West Africa, Australia and more. Of those enrolled in the class, the median student age was 28. Forty-one percent of students had bachelor’s degrees, while as many as 32 percent had advanced degrees.
In developing Dartmouth’s first online course, the team behind the MOOC said they werechallenged to think critically about global students’ different learning processes without any prior experience with online courses.
“What was different [about the online course] was that it was like driving blind,” Friedland said. “I prepared this whole course with the help of my instructional designer, but we created this course with almost zero feedback with what people thought. When I’m giving a lecture, I’m constantly looking around. Is this person falling asleep or getting what I’m saying? With an online course, it’s very delayed feedback. You really have to project and guess how learners from other parts of the world learn.”
For teaching assistant Justin Richardson, conversations with thousands of students revealed how different individuals across the globe applied their growing knowledge of environmental science.
“The majority of questions I answered went beyond the course material and ventured into other subjects, such as the history of physics and chemistry, to everyday commonplace topics such as home gardening,” Richardson said. “It was great to see that they took the material presented in the course and ran with it, trying to figure out what did it mean for their lives.”
Yet with thousands of students enrolled in a course comes restrictions. Goudzwaard cited accessibility as one of the team’s main challenges when designing the course.
“We wanted to make the barrier to entry to the course as low as possible,” Goudzwaard said. “This meant that we would not require the purchase of a textbook, but would instead using open-source readings. This was more challenging than we expected and required some revision and even writing certain articles for the course.”
Despite online education’s limitations, Friedland said that one benefit to the course was the strength of the online community, as demonstrated by students’ willingness to answer each others’ questions. In future iterations of the class, Friedland plans on building this community even further by adding more Google hangout sessions, which served as office hours.
“We only had one office hour that we ran on Google hangouts, and we actually had people emailing [questions] in, sending [them] in over Twitter, and we’d read the questions and other students would be helping answer them,” Friedland said. “We’d have as many as 500 people participating live.”
Kim said that his goal for DartmouthX was exploring both the teaching and learning experience through new, technology-focused initiatives. He said, however, that online education cannot replace the College’s current course offerings.
“We’re doing this DartmouthX experiment as a way to carve out a place where we can take some risks and do some new things, or try things out, because we don’t want to experiment on [the students], and this gives us some freedom because [the course] is free,” he said. “We don’t view the DartmouthX classes as a substitute for your regular Dartmouth classes.”
