Background: The number of sections of Math 0309 has drastically increased as St. Edward’s student population has changed in recent years. The math department is striving to improve students’ success in this course to support the university’s mission of strengthening our developmental education.
A pilot of a self-paced Math 0309 course ran this spring. The students used ALEKS (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces), an adaptive self-paced computer platform. In the fall of 2014, we will be running multiple sections of the self-paced Math 0309 course.
Although the software excels in many areas, it lacks content videos for the students to learn from. Videos allow students to hear explanations in real time and be able to pause and repeat and as needed.
Innovation Project: Create around 60 mini lecture videos to supplement the ALEKS software and host these videos to a course website. Each video will explain one topic, so students can pick and choose quickly video clips they need to watch. Content would be explained in the same manner as their software and textbook to provide consistency and avoid confusion.
Status of Innovation Project, as of 5/30: Over a third of the videos have been recorded and the webpage now exists (without content!). All videos will be completed before August so they will be included in Math 0309 in the fall semester.
Assessment Plans:
- Data collected in Fall 2014 will be compared to Spring 2014 Pilot, including completion rates of objectives, time spent working on each objective, and overall course grade.
- Observations from Fall 2014 will be recorded in detail to be compared with observations from the pilot. Particular observations to include are demand of instructor and TA help in the classroom (and outside of the classroom) and the impact on the math tutoring lab attendance from 0309 students (and any changes in the nature of their visits).
- The number of views will be tracked on all course videos.
Remaining Work: Finish making videos and complete the course webpage that hosts the videos. In addition to this project, curriculum, materials, and the course schedule will be overhauled this summer.
