Adult students frequently have time and location constraints, hardships that are also shared by gifted high school students in remote and urban districts where access to high-quality technical education is limited. Effective distance-delivered online courses can serve these learners, but the curriculum must be specifically designed for their special needs. Our focus is the calculus-based, introductory physics course, which is the port of entry for any young person, or non-traditional older student, interested in pursuing a technical degree. Our objective is to package classroom best practices in an engaging online format that will enable any qualified student to be successful. The best of these strategies involve collaborative interactions among students using realistic contexts. This poses a problem for a distance-delivered course. It is difficult to identify authentic tasks that are suited to the wide variety of students found in a virtual classroom. In addition, the logistics and time delays associated with synchronous online learning make it difficult to maintain a timely schedule.

Our course will be delivered under a primary metaphor based on situations associated with motion picture production and analysis. Students work in small, electronically connected groups to solve complex problems that appear to have been proposed by a production studio, a group of writers, or even a defense attorney. Most people are naturally attracted to motion pictures and are easily engaged by the scenarios in the team projects.

Materials provided on the course Web site include carefully structured sections that help students develop understanding and skills. During this part of the course social interactions are simulated through responses managed by a database of student answers. In this way, learners will get the feel of interacting with their peers without the complication of live connections. We've designed a novel Web portal that simulates a movie consultant workroom. The unit lessons are accessed through a notebook that is available on the workroom table. Other branches of the course are linked from different features of the room (in and out boxes, wall postings, and information drawers in the table).

The structure of the lessons within each unit of the course consists of single-concept modules, each designed to deal with a well-defined learning objective. Much of our effort so far has dealt with assessment of different online delivery formats and scripting tools. We’ve arrived at a Flash/Shockwave solution that is both flexible and easy to edit. For example, we’ve developed a Flash-based diagram entry tool with which students can submit any type of line drawing (force diagram, time-record graph, mathematical expressions).

We class tested a complete unit of the course in three different semesters. The most recent trial in March 2008, showed that normalized gains in student understanding improved more than what was measured in a parallel control group that did not have access to the online materials. In particular, dramatic improvement in understanding of key concepts was realized through simulated social interactions.

ONLINE REFERENCES: 

Course Site
   http://higgs.mines.edu/ph100online  

Project Development Web Site
   http://higgs.mines.edu/fipse  

Thomas Furtak
Project Director

Colorado School of Mines
Department of Physics
1500 Illinois Street
Golden, CO 80401
Tel: 303-273-3843
Fax: 303-273-3919