Abstract:
While web-based course offerings are growing rapidly across various institutions and disciplines, there is an emerging need to enhance student interactions and active learning for online learning environments. An Introduction to Agroecology online course was developed at North Carolina State University purposefully with the intention of maximizing student interactions and active learning through diverse instructional strategies to create a collaborative, virtual learning community. This paper will describe the course development, outline the specific strategies to promote active learning and student interactions used, and share student evaluations and lessons learned; complied after eight semesters of teaching this online course. From course evaluations and post-course surveys, students valued the opportunities to interact with each other and the instructor and stressed the importance of making time and treating their online course like their face-to-face courses. The instructor used the evaluations and surveys each semester to continually assess student experiences and impacts of specific course components. The instructional strategies, evaluation process and lessons learned described here are general and diverse enough to be easily utilized by a variety of online courses in various stages of development. This purpose of this paper is to stimulate further communication on successful pedagogical strategies for collaborative and interactive online teaching and learning.
Keywords:
interactive online learning, agroecology
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