Habitable Worlds: Delivering on the Promises of Online Education.

Critical thinking and scientific reasoning are central to higher education in the United States, but many courses (in-person and online) teach students information about science much more than they teach the actual process of science and its associated knowledge and skills. In the online arena specifically, the tools available for course construction exacerbate this problem by making it difficult to build the types of active learning activities that research shows to be the most effective. Here, we present a report on Habitable Worlds, offered by Arizona State University for 12 semesters over the past 6 years. This is a unique online course that uses an array of novel technologies to deliver an active, inquiry-driven learning experience. Learning outcomes and quantitative data from more than 3000 students demonstrate the success of our approach but also identify several remaining challenges. The design and development of this course offers valuable lessons for instructional designers and educators who are interested in fully capitalizing on the capabilities of 21st-century technology to achieve educational goals. Key Words: Online education-Active learning-SETI-Astrobiology-Teaching. Astrobiology 17, 86-99.

Students in Fully Online Programs Report More Positive Attitudes toward Science Than Students in Traditional, In-Person Programs.

Following the growth of online, higher-education courses, academic institutions are now offering fully online degree programs. Yet it is not clear how students who enroll in fully online degree programs are similar to those students who enroll in in-person ("traditional") degree programs. Because previous work has shown students' attitudes toward science can affect their performance in a course, it is valuable to ask how attitudes toward science differ between these two populations. We studied students who completed a fully online astrobiology course. In an analysis of 451 student responses to the Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience survey, we found online program students began the course with a higher scientific sophistication and a higher sense of personal value of science than those in traditional programs. Precourse attitudes also showed some predictive power of course grades among online students, but not for traditional students. Given established relationships between feelings of personal value, intrinsic motivation, and, in turn, traits such as persistence, our results suggest that open-ended or exploration-based learning may be more engaging to online program students due to their pre-existing attitudes. The converse may also be true, that certain pre-existing attitudes among online program students are more detrimental than they are for traditional program students.