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INVESTIGATOR: Seyedmonir, M.

PERFORMING INSTITUTION:
WEST VIRGINIA STATE UNIVERSITY
PO BOX 1000
INSTITUTE, WEST VIRGINIA 25112

LEARNING AND TEACHING BIOLOGICAL & AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE ONLINE: INCREASING SUCCESS THROUGH COMPREHENSIVE TRAINING, DEVELOPMENT, AND RESEARCH

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Online or distance education is now seen as an opportunity not only to increase enrollments in colleges and universities, but also to provide rural and disadvantaged students and community members with access to high quality educational experiences. While the prevalence of online and blended courses is on the increase, these increases are not extending into the biology and agricultural science areas. The reluctance on the part of science faculty to teach online stems from three primary concerns (1) there is little training or information available on the effectiveness, application, and design of such courses for faculty in science fields, (2) while such courses are attractive to students and community members seeking to learn on their own time, many come into these environments without the self-directed learning strategies necessary to succeed, and (3) courses in the biological and agricultural sciences are lab based and transitioning the lab portion of the course online is viewed with skepticism. The goal of the following proposal is to address this issue in a comprehensive interdisciplinary way that will increase the likelihood of student success in online and blended biology courses, further current knowledge in the areas of distance learning, and serve the community by taking best practices to extension agents and community members. This multipronged approach includes the following components and integrates education, research, and extension in an effort to maximize the impact of the program: 1-Development of an online training program for science faculty on how to design, develop and administer online and blended courses in a way that facilitates student learning 2-Development of a training program for students on how to successfully learn in online and blended environments 3-Research on equivalency of virtual, blended and online biology labs, and 4-Integrating findings into trainings for extension agents and community members to increase successful completion of online workshops offered via extension services. Trainings will be made available to other faculty at other land grant institutions and will be disseminated through web pages and our learning management system. Research findings will be disseminated via, informational workshops, articles in relevant newsletters and journals, or presentations at conferences.

OBJECTIVES: Objective 1: Train and assist Food and Agricultural Science and Biology faculty, Extension staff, and the Center for Online Learning constituents in pedagogical best practices for the development of interactive, media-rich, online and blended learning training courses. Objective 2: Develop an, accessible, media-rich online training program for students focusing on self-directed learning strategies for online environments, technological efficacy, realistic expectations, and motivation strategies Objective 3: Design a series of flipped Extension workshops in areas related to global food security Objective 4: Conduct educational research into the efficacy of virtual labs on actual lab proficiency and on flipped classroom methodologies as a method of promoting higher order thinking in Food and Agricultural Science areas Objective 5: Develop facility and production capacity to create, manage, and house media-rich, interactive blended and online courses through network and facilities upgrades; establishment of COL Multimedia Development Lab and Instructional Design Center; and creation of reciprocal agreements betweenCOL and WVSU-ES's DigiSo Design Collaborative.