Course Redesign ePortfolio Showcase

For this course redesign, I surveyed students about what worked and did not work for them in the online environment for this course. Discussion forums are always a tough area in an online course and students wanted more direction. Students did not like the virtual labs I had used in the Spring '14 course and wanted more hands-on labs. I redesigned components of the course to implement more engaging labs and discussions. I also incorporated aspects of proven course design such as discussion rubrics and LMS exam strategies.

In AY 2013-2014, we redesigned CSUF's second semester General Chemistry course, CHEM 120B, which includes concurrent lecture and laboratory components. Serving as a required pre-requisite for Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biology majors, as well as for many other students pursuing career paths in the health professions, total course enrollment is limited by a lack of space and materials in the laboratory component. Additionally, the course had a high average failure rate (C- or lower) of 23% due to what we suspect are poor topical parallels between the laboratory and lecture lessons. Our redesign of the course involved a complete rewrite of the laboratory portion of the course, which included the incorporation of a virtual laboratory component to complement the students' wet lab experience. The pilot year of our redesign proved successful in increasing the average passable rate of the course, and so we were granted additional support funding to continue our work.

Stat 250 is a general elective introductory statistics and data analysis course for students throughout the sciences, social sciences, health and human services, and business. This course redesign develops a flipped classroom format whereby students learn core statistical concepts in online videos created by the instructors and participate in computer data analysis labs and directed problem-solving discussions. The aim of this approach is to teach statistics by doing, internalizing key concepts in experimental design, data collection, and analysis as well as statistical communication and assessments through an active classroom learning environment. The ultimate goal is to scale this effort up to all introductory statistics courses taught on campus, through online core concept lectures and subject-specific data analysis/statistical problem solving laboratories.

We have constructed a fully online course in introductory physics at the calculus-based level providing students an authentic means of interacting with both the instructor and their peers as members of a local scientific community while deeply engaging the scientific process. Through the use of an innovative online interaction tool, Learn.Koondis.com, we aim to provide 1) excellent preparation for downstream STEM coursework, 2) an authentic experience of physics as an academic discipline and career, and 3) and affordable and flexible online course.

Biometrics (BIOL 300) was redesigned by replacing the weekly face-to-face laboratory sessions, which are held in a computer classroom, with online labs. Virtual lab activities were developed and integrated into the assignments so that students were involved in both data collection and data analysis. The lecture remained face-to-face. This mode of delivery decreased the cost per student by 55% and allowed more sections of the course to be offered. Pre- and post-surveys were administered to sections using traditional labs and sections using virtual labs. Analyses of the survey responses and course grades showed that there were no significant differences between the two delivery modes in the students increase in knowledge about statistics or in their attitudes towards statistics. These results suggest that the biostatistics virtual labs are just as effective pedagogically as the traditional labs, but more cost efficient.

This project aims to redesign the NURS220 course, a 4 unit intermediate medical surgical nursing theory course, that is offered in the spring and fall quarters of each academic year, it is a required course for nursing major. The purpose of re-designing this course is to first, improve the quality of this course, by introducing nursing students to the e-learning method known as "Virtual Clinical Excursions" (VCE), and second, to investigate nursing students' perceptions about the effectiveness of implementing the VCE in improving their learning experiences and learning outcomes. Third, to provide students with access to virtual hospital setting in which they will have self-paced time, and safe virtual space to perform intermediate medical surgical nursing care for virtual patients.

This project seeks to redesign the Biology 1BL Lab course, which is part of the Introductory Biology sequence for Biology Majors, to incorporate more active-learning modules in combination with computer simulations to effectively engage students. Our goal is to increase student success within this class and help prepare students with relevant laboratory skills, a proper conceptual framework, and effective learning strategies to improve their progress throughout the Biology major.

Stat 250 is a general elective introductory statistics and data analysis course for students throughout the sciences, social sciences, health and human services, and business. This course redesign develops a flipped classroom format whereby students learn core statistical concepts in online videos created by the instructors and participate in computer data analysis labs and directed problem-solving discussions. The aim of this approach is to teach statistics by doing, internalizing key concepts in experimental design, data collection, and analysis as well as statistical communication and assessments through an active classroom learning environment. The ultimate goal is to scale this effort up to all introductory statistics courses taught on campus, through online core concept lectures and subject-specific data analysis/statistical problem solving laboratories.

In the spring of 2010, the Humboldt State University Geospatial Task Force was formed to improve the geospatial curriculum. The group was assigned to develop an effective series of Geospatial courses that would serve students across multiple programs. Multiple areas of redundancy were identified across the different specializations within the geospatial curriculum, including Cartography, Geographic Information Systems, and Remote Sensing. Each of these courses share a similar set of fundamental concepts related to the geospatial sciences. Geospatial Concepts serves as a gateway course for the remainder of the Geospatial Curriculum. The course topics include the history and fundamental concepts common among all the geospatial sciences. In addition, the course covers introductory material and techniques specific to each geospatial discipline that follows. The result is an information-dense course that establishes a strong foundation moving forward. Relieved of the necessity to cover introductory material, subsequent courses have been free to shift upward in content, technique, and application. Since the implementation of Geospatial Concepts as a gateway course, a measurable level of improvement and sophistication in later courses has been observed.

We redesigned a GE biology course by using existing web-based software to replace traditional wet labs. Two new modes of lab instruction were compared to the traditional offering: (1) all labs online with a "drop-by" help center and (2) a hybrid "flipped lab" model with two tracks of online and in-person labs alternating every week. Both modes included a face-to-face lecture. Engaging inquiry-based exercises were developed around each online activity where students are provided background information, guided though a series of basic experiments, encouraged to design their own experiments, and required to produce a simple scientific report that is delivered electronically. A rubric was designed so that graduate assistants can grade reports. The course offerings with online labs were piloted during the 2013/14 academic year. Formative assessment involved the tracking of students' attitudes and performance. Summative assessment compared student performance for the online, hybrid and traditional modes.

Bottlenecks in introductory geology (EES1) labs arise from two compounding limitations: the number of students a lab room can hold and the number of graduate students available to serve as teaching assistants (TAs). This past Fall 2014, EES1 had ~500 seats available for ~5400 eligible GE B1students. Despite that bottleneck, lack of TAs resulted in the cancellation of 1 lecture and 5 accompanying labs. Given that the number of EES1 sections offered each semester is limited by the lab, there is a huge potential to make EES1 less vulnerable to limitations on lab size and TA availability by offering hybrid labs, where half of the labs are online and half are hands-on. This redesign seeks to implement virtual labs to reduce bottlenecking while updating EES1 lab curriculum into something that engages students at more innovative, modern levels of learning.

Principles and practice of analytical chemistry. Topics include error analysis and statistical treatment of data, gravimetric and volumetric analysis, electroanalytical techniques, chromatography, and selected quantitative instrumental techniques.

BIOL 104 (4) Principles of Biology: Human Emphasis Principles of cellular, organismal and population biology with primary representation relating to the human organism. Includes study of cells, tissues, and mammalian organ systems. Enrollment restricted to Kinesiology majors. Three hours of lecture and three hours of laboratory.

This course does not have a lab component. In order to enhance the student's learning experience, virtual labs and on-line simulation activities are adopted and implemented to the course. Submission Templates are developed and provided for students. Students are asked to submit filled activity template upon completion of the corresponding virtual lab.

The goal of the course re-design is to enhance science teacher preparation through the incorporation of virtual labs that engage students with Earth Science content and practices in ways that were not possible with previous lab activities. This course integrates the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and scientific practices as an organizing framework. The use and development of virtual labs will also enhance student information, communication, and literacy skills as they prepare to teach 21st century learners. Eventually, by replacing half of the face-to-face lab meetings with virtual labs, this re-design will also allow us to offer additional sections of the course and lab, in light of a graduate instructor shortage.

CSUCI is one of the fastest growing institutions in the U.S. As the number of students grows in our classes, bottleneck challenges have arisen for several reasons. As the class size increases, the amount of grading done by the sole instructor greatly increases. Consequently, the amount of time left to the instructor to prepare materials is significantly reduced. The use of an Online Homework Management System as a Virtual Lab provides ample opportunity to transition from practice to mastery—an opportunity that otherwise would be missed simply because there is a limitation to how much grading an instructor can complete while also being responsible to deliver knowledge to a diverse group of students throughout a semester.

This is a one unit General Chemistry Lab for non-science majors that is offered online. The course requires students to run eleven virtual labs offered by external vendor, Latenitelabs.com and submit lab reports online. Students 'enter' a 3D portal that is representative of the actual lab space and use virtual glassware, instruments and chemicals which resemble the actual lab materials. The Lab requires physical class participation three times during the semester where students come to campus for a three hour Lab lecture sessiom. Students have the opportunity to ask questions and learn how to do the online experiments using Latenitelabs tools, learn how to obtain relavant data to prove hypotheses, analyse results, perform calculations, and discuss how their observations and methodologies help achieve the goal. During Lab lectures, Students are tested on the Chemical principles, protocols, data collection, analyses, calculations and error sources etc with the aid of hand-written exams. Assessment of student learning shows that this method is equally efficient in teaching students the theory and methodology of Chemistry Labs.

The Virtual Lab for Electricity and Magnetism is enhanced through team-based learning, which is an essential part of laboratories. It is based on an inexpensive (~$60) home kit and Koondis (social networking platform for small cooperative teams). Students collaborate in small teams of 4-5 members to perform "3D Labs", 3D = design, discover, and discuss. The experiments are not rigid, allow for openess and lead to discovery. The experiments are designed, approved, documented, peer evaluated, and shared through the collaborative Koondis online platform.

The purpose of this project was to compare student learning outcomes from the Virtual Exercise physiology lab with that from traditional exercise physiology laboratory activities. Student participants from the spring 2015 Exercise Physiology course were randomly assigned to either experimental group 1 or group 2. Group 1 completed traditional laboratory activities, whereas group 2 completed the Virtual Laboratory. Both groups then completed the same assessment to evaluate their understanding of Aerobic and Anaerobic Power laboratory concepts. Mean Aerobic Power Lab activity assessment scores were 80.5 ± 5.5 and 80.6 ± 6.7 and mean Anaerobic Power Lab assessment scores were 81.5 ± 8.0 and 82.0 ± 6.4 for groups 1 and 2, respectively. In this investigation, 50% of the students indicated a preference for the traditional laboratory activity, and exact half percent of the class either actually preferred the Virtual Exercise Physiology Laboratory program (28.9%) or did not prefer one laboratory type over another (21.1%). Students agreed that the Virtual Exercise Physiology Laboratory program was at least moderately educational (21%), but most students thought that the Virtual Exercise Physiology Laboratory program was very educational (78.9%). These findings support that virtual laboratories instruct students as effectively as traditional laboratories

This project redesigns the existing face-to-face lab section so that it will be a virtual lab section. Some relevant existing content will be converted to virtual content, whereas new content will be added to enhance students' active learning without classroom meetings. This redesign addresses bottleneck issues, including the reduction of DFW rates as well as the reduction in the number of students on the wait list.

This is an introductory statistics class which covers the traditional introductory topics and uses StatCrunch as the statistical software package.

Project Abstract: This project entails creating virtual labs for the online portion of Math 105.

This course provides biochemistry fundamentals to non-biochemistry students in the biology and chemistry departments. It currently does not have an associated lab. This class is impacted and has been over-enrolled every year for the past 3 years. We will use virtual labs created by Labster Inc to provide students with virtual exposure to key concepts in biochemistry including enzyme kinetics, metabolism, bioenergetics, regulation, and protein/nucleic acid structure-function. Here we examine the effects of these virtual labs on student achievement and satisfaction in the hopes that the DFW rates will decrease, student satisfaction with the course will increase, and student self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation to learn the material is enhanced.

The goal was to redesign the course to take place in a computer lab for lecture and design customized Virtual Lab videos using the Learning Glass. The Virtual Lab videos are to demonstrate how to use MATLAB software. The combination of lecture time to practice Scientific Computing labs and having access to the demonstrations will allow students to complete lab assignments successfully at home.

This course introduces various material property testing methods. Through this course students are expected to learn and understand the techniques and effort involved in the mechanical testing of engineering materials; verify various principles and theories of mechanics of materials and their limitations; and gain experience in the acquisition, reduction and analysis of experimental engineering data.

We plan to develop web based tools and materials that can be incorporated into learning modules that intergrade self-guided field observation/data collection (e.g. sun angle, solar radiation, weather elements, plant associations, rock structures, etc.), with scientific data accessible via the web (e.g. from NASA, USGS, etc.) to help students to connect the concepts they are learning from textbooks to the real world they live in. We are exploring tools and software for this project.

This course redesign project aims to integrate the virtual lab into the existing GE lecture course for the remaining quarter years until we start the semester system in Fall 2018. This course fulfills GE Sub-area B1. Lab exercises, including computer based labs and field based labs, will be part of the course with the lectures.

CE 147 (Transportation Engineering) is a 4 unit required course in the Civil Engineering curriculum. It is an introductory course for some students and the only course in the area of Transportation Engineering for students who do not pursue an elective in the Transportation area. The course serves as a pre-requisite to other Transportation elective courses and serves students to prepare for their Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam which the first step towards eventual Professional Engineering (PE) certification. Lectures and labs are conducted every week. Each lab activity is two to three weeks in duration. Depending on students' interests in pursuing other Transportation electives, students will take this course either in their junior or senior level semesters. In this course redesign, the lab section of the course will be redesigned using two separate models of virtual labs. First, a number of pre-lab learning modules will be developed which will be used to introduce students to background knowledge and information on the concepts used in the upcoming labs. Second, students will be provided information and guidelines on how to effectively conduct field data collection for upcoming lab exercises to help them better prepare for the challenges associated with field data collection.

Hydraulics Laboratory is a required course for all civil engineering students at Sacramento State that examines six hydraulic phenomena via six experiments. Because of time and equipment constraints, each student's hands-on experience is limited, likely contributing to the 6% repeating grade rate for the course (in AY 2014-15). The course redesign will add virtual "pre-labs" based on computational simulations of the physical phenomena covered in the course. These "pre-labs" will allow every student to perform extensive manipulations of the conditions affecting the hydraulic phenomena under study and are expected to increase student engagement and learning.

The cadaver lab at CSUS may or may not be discontinued in the near future. In order to prepare for the possibility that the cadaver lab may be discontinued, I propose to implement a number of virtual labs in Spring 2016 to test feasibility, effectiveness, student attitudes, and student success with virtual anatomy/cadaver labs. It is hoped that virtual labs that incorporate drawing exercises may also improve student success in the course.

There are a limited number of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) and robots available in our lab, hindering the ability of individual students to utilize them and truly understanding how to program. Hence, this redesign will implement the use of emulation tools that will mimic PLC operation and robotic programming. The robot emulation tools are intended for robotics programmers who want to design their code and simulate the movements before uploading it and testing it on a physical robot. Moving to emulation we can scale the course to any size, will be able to properly evaluate student knowledge, and most of all, would dramatically improve the depth of knowledge.

I am designing a virtual reality (VR) videogame which simulates camera controls of a camera and offers students control over individual photography aspects in an effort to provide an equal playing field for all students in the course. The game introduces each variable of the camera on an individual basis, allowing students to observe and analyze how each variable is functioning. As the student progresses through the game, different controls will be added, eventually allowing students to have full control over a virtual manual camera. In addition to the controls, students will be given a series of tasks inside the game to accomplish demonstrating a thorough understanding of composition and visual language. The game will grade the assignments in the game allowing students to see immediate feedback. In addition, the course will include an RPG game to replace workbooks and quizzes in the course with the goal being to move students away from a course base point system consisting of a finite number of points and into a gamification point system with an unlimited number of points.

By incorporating technology into the student's pre-laboratory activities through the use of simulations and virtual labs the students will have access to view and practice the techniques and skills they will be using in the laboratory before they even come to laboratory. This will not only allow students engage with material is a risk free environment where they could make mistakes without the potential hazards involved in a wet-chemistry type lab, but to also promote inquiry-based learning. By having the students engaged with the material before they come into class, it will give them a creative outlet to explore ideas and hypothesis while also allowing for them to be better prepared for laboratory. Together these two things could lead to increased student learning and better performance in the class which will raise their grades and lower the DFW rate. Also with redesigning and implementing a significantly cheaper laboratory manual, it will make the course more accessible to low income students by making it more affordable.

BIOL 10 is one of the largest courses at Fresno State and is experiencing bottleneck issues due to the limitation on seating in the laboratory portion of the course. A hybrid model of virtual and physical labs will alleviate those seating constraints as well as allow us to shift some of the Teaching Assistants into the large lection classes to facilitate the inclusion of active learning techniques.

Current demands on resources in CSU San Marcos' Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, as well as, planned growth limit the numbers of CHEM 105L sections which can be offered in a face-to-face format. This lab class also continues to be one of the bottleneck courses for the impacted pre-nursing and kinesiology programs on our campus. By switching to a hybrid virtual plus hands-on/take-home lab model for the lab sections we will be able to offer more sections and get students to graduation with less strain on instructional lab space resources. CHEM 105 lecture schedules will need to be coordinated with the revised CHEM 105L lab schedule so this redesign is for both the lecture and the lab components.

We focused on improving student success in entry level math classes in the California State University and California Community College System. Our consortium has developed an innovative, technology-enhanced hybrid course model that has significantly improved course completion and content mastery outcomes in entry-level mathematics courses. The model relies on five primary components that are carefully articulated to create a reliable "flow of learning" for students.

In AY 2013-2014, we redesigned CSUF's second semester General Chemistry course, CHEM 120B, which includes concurrent lecture and laboratory components. Serving as a required pre-requisite for Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biology majors, as well as for many other students pursuing career paths in the health professions, total course enrollment is limited by a lack of space and materials in the laboratory component. Additionally, the course had a high average failure rate (C- or lower) of 23% due to what we suspect are poor topical parallels between the laboratory and lecture lessons. Our redesign of the course involved a complete rewrite of the laboratory portion of the course, which included the incorporation of a virtual laboratory component to complement the students' wet lab experience. The pilot year of our redesign proved successful in increasing the average passable rate of the course, and so we were granted additional support funding to continue our work.

PHYS 100AL is the laboratory that accompanies the first algebra-based introductory course on Physics. Due to increased demand, we are having difficulty offering enough sections of this laboratory course unless we renovate and create a new physical laboratory. A way to solve this problem is to "hybridize" the PHYS 100AL. This will allow us to double the capacity of these labs so we can offer fewer sections but still accommodate more students. Our hybrid lab comprises 6 in-class labs which are the traditional labs done in a controlled environment employing specialized and more sensitive equipment plus 6 take-home labs which are experiments that students perform outside on their own schedule. These take-home labs are "wet labs"; they are actual experiments performed with physical objects and not simulations performed on a computer. This reminds the students that science does not happen only inside a lab but is all around us. It also reinforces the importance of errors in any measurement as the take-home labs tend to be less precise due to the simpler equipment used. We also took this opportunity to update the lab manual to introduce the use of EXCEL in data analysis. In addition, although errors in measurements, their treatment and propagation of errors are emphasized in the old lab manual, we find that the majority of the students have a very poor understanding of what they are doing and are not able to interpret their use. The redesigned lab manual incorporates changes to address this problem.