STEM Education Institute Tuesday Seminar
“Science Education Online: Inquiry and the Teaching of Electricity and Magnetism Course – What We Learned”
Chris Emery, Amherst Regional High School
Mary Mawn, Teacher Education & Curriculum Studies, University of Massachusetts
This past summer, the graduate course “Inquiry and the Teaching of Electricity and Magnetism” was offered online for the first time. One of the goals for this course was to have students “learn by doing” by participating in a variety of guided and open-ended inquiries. Throughout the course, students were able to answer existing questions and to ask deeper questions as a result of doing lab work in the home, thinking about the results, and interacting with others via online discussions. This talk will provide an overview of the structure of this course and describe lessons learned while teaching online. Data about the effectiveness of the course consists of anecdotal comments, student performance on weekly quizzes and major assignments, and pre-/post confidence survey results.