Inspiring Online Collaborative STEM Learning
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Inspiring Online Collaborative STEM Learning Scott A. Sinex1, Theodore L. Chambers1, and Joshua B. Halpern2 1 Physical Sciences & Engineering, Prince George’s Community College, Largo, MD 20774 2 Chemistry, Howard University, Washington, DC 20059 ABSTRACT Educators are advocating a variety of 21st century technologies to increase student engagement and prepare them for the modern workplace. As part of this effort this paper describes the development of several introductory laboratory activities which enhance online collaborative skills in the context of group collaborations. The experiments mostly deal with measurement and error in the context of mathematical modeling. They inculcate online collaborative skills including group writing, collection of experimental data, student feedback, and assessment using forms, spreadsheets with data pooling, real-time graphing/computations, and discussions using chat. These are all available in Google Drive, a free cloud-based application. We have also introduced student collaborative-pair computational spreadsheet assignments, and results of two projects in general chemistry are presented. Building formative assessment into these activities allows for immediate adjustment to instruction. This approach could be used from middle school through the undergraduate level. It can be implemented both in informal education or formal classroom settings by enhancing interactions with remote partners. Student evaluations have been very positive for the variety of activities, as well as from workshop feedback from high school teachers. INTRODUCTION In a recent Pearson-Microsoft-Gallup report [1], the weakest of eight categories of 21st century classroom skills studied in undergraduate education was found to be online collaboration. This weakness is of concern and needs to be addressed as online notebooks, student collaboration, and collaborative reporting become skills needed in STEM courses. Moreover, on line collaboration has become a major component of today’s technical workplace. We have started to address this need by introducing data pooling followed by an online chat in the laboratory using Google Drive [2, 3]. Our earlier paper [2] discussed work using Google Drive for online collaboration in STEM disciplines. Use of a collaborative approach was expanded into a variety of other activities as discussed in the next section. There have been few publications on using Google Drive and similar tools to enhance collaborative education. What has appeared mostly discusses this in the context of teacher training. Rowe and others [4] used Google Drive to produce an authentic authoring environment for physiotherapy students, while Denton [5] outlined a variety of uses for assessment in a graduate education class. Herr et al. [6] and Vandergon et al. [7] at CSUN have developed a number of data pooling activities and formative assessment techniques as part of their teacher preparation program. Preston et al. [8] have shown that pre-service teachers had a transformative attitude change after using G
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