STEM Courses Strategies
What Challenges Will an Online STEM Course Face?
Historically, the adoption rate of online teaching and learning has differed among various academic disciplines. STEM subjects, in particular, have been much less likely to utilize online learning. In a study on COVID-19's effect on STEM education, 35% of participants never taught online prior to the 2020 pivot to emergency remote instruction (Seamen et al., 2021). In fact, less than half of the participants had ever taught an online course, and approximately a third of the participants had developed their own online course. This lower adoption rate stems from misconceptions and perceived expectations of online learning platforms. The content on this page addresses some of these misconceptions and perceptions and offers strategies for creating successful online STEM courses.
Some of the perceived barriers to creating online STEM courses overlap with hesitancies concerning online learning in general, such as learner motivation, academic integrity, and technology access. Therefore, we'll focus primarily on the unique concerns of creating online courses for STEM.
The outstanding STEM-related barrier to online learning is online labs. So outstanding, in fact, that three-quarters of surveyed STEM faculty report this as their biggest hesitance to teaching (Seamen et al., 2021). A common perception of online labs is that they won't equal the experience of in-person labs. However, advancements in tools and technologies that target STEM disciplines can reduce this reluctance. For example, virtual labs can decrease the cost of materials, offer the ability to conduct a lab from any location, and provide students with the chance to replicate or reproduce experiments multiple times without using physical objects.
Strategies to Support Online STEM Courses
While the following list is not exhaustive, many of these strategies can be implemented into your online STEM courses to increase student engagement, success, and motivation. As noted best practices will be applicable outside of STEM courses as well. Above all, good teaching—defined as timely feedback in logic, content, and form, and a structured active learning environment—is paramount to student learning and is not restricted to specific disciplines or modalities (Mayhew et al., 2016).
- Assessments and Academic Integrity
- Avoid designing assessments with questions that are easy to Google (e.g., provide a definition or calculate the answer to an equation commonly found in textbooks)
- Incorporate real-world problems or activities
- Offer frequent, short, formative practice tests or quizzes with immediate feedback instead of singular, high-stakes exams
- Use Excel-based simulations to improve online student understanding of deterministic financial models
- Instructional Materials
- Create instructor videos using resources at your <Replace - Institution Name>
- Avoid lecturing for long periods of time. Research has shown that students who are lectured to are 1.5 times more likely to fail (Freeman, 2018). Deliver Content Using Short, Focused, Instructional Videos
- Active Learning
- Apply active learning principles. Active learning has proven to improve learner performance and success rates in STEM courses (Chen et al., 2018).
- View a recorded presentation by Dr. Scott Freeman, principal lecturer in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, as he presents a high-level overview of the role of active learning in STEM disciplines and implications for technology-mediated course redesign.
- Embed Interactive Questioning within Course Content
- Encourage learner-learner interactions with peer mentoring/instruction, structured discussions, or group collaboration Promote Active Learning in Group Projects Through the Use of the Transparent Assignment Framework
- Discussions & Blogs
- Virtual Labs
- Many publishers offer online labs that can replace or enhance in-person lab experiences.
- Strengthening STEM Laboratory Assessment Using Learner Portfolio and Electronic Assessment
- Adaptive Learning
Resources to Support Online STEM Courses
- Humanizing Online STEM toolkit Links to an external site.: provides access to research data, videos, and professional development related to humanizing online STEM courses. "Humanizing leverages learning science and culturally responsive teaching to create an inclusive, equitable online class climate for today’s diverse students" (Pacansky-Brock, 2020).