Name
Shana Tribiano, Associate Professor
Department
Science
Type of Leave
Fellowship Award for Improvement of teaching
Full year starting Spring 2022
Project Description
In this fellowship I created online active learning tools to improve learning in online and hybrid open education general astronomy survey classes, by creating full curriculum materials with freely available, extensively developed, online, active-learning tools and visualization software, in particular the simulations from PhET, Foothills, and UNL. Utilizing these tools builds on the success of my Astronomy 110 video-lecture set, that uses the free, OpenStax Astronomy2e e-textbook. The new materials add concept demonstrations and active learning elements to the lecture, homework, and lab components of the department’s astronomy classes delivered in any mode – hybrid, fully online, as well as in-person classes,
Here are some examples:
- Content that utilizes web-based resources to give an online introduction to the class topics, while addressing diversity and inclusion goals, by including traditionally underrepresented astrophysicists’ publicly posted TED-talks.
- A concept demonstration about orbits, that is interactive and can teach the comparative planes of planetary orbits by clicking an dragging the viewing angle of the solar system, the orbital speeds of planets with a variable simulation speed, show the difference between the eccentricities of orbits of planets compared to dwarf planets and comets, while allowing you to zoom in and out on your field of view, all in one visually communicative tool. That’s not possible with a single graphic or fixed lab set up. It is applied in our Retrograde Motion of Mars lab to give insight for why Mars’ mapped motion always hovers close to the ecliptic, and in a solar system structure demonstration.
- A graded homework assignment that uses an active-learning simulation that students must use for homework to study the phases of Venus.
- Embedding, into a lecture-video, several added tools: a PBS-produced math tutorial, an active-learning interactive, and a visualization created by the Hayden Planetarium’s simulation software, which was that allows you to fly through the universe exploring all scales, near to far, using real data.
I presented my content at the last Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s Virtual Conference, which generated fruitful consideration of how delivery affects students registered with the Office of Accessibility. Post-presentation discussion steered implementation of this work, as well as future consideration for best practices. I will continue to discuss my results at the next meeting. For now my conclusion on this topic is that accessibility considerations are unique and deserve unique versions of the class.
After currently testing the first implementation of this new content, I will share it with the Science Department’s astronomy instruction team, noting that the online lab curriculum materials I developed for the pandemic continue to be used today. After these two terms of refining this work, I will post all created content to the open education astronomy community on the OER Commons website, a hub for sharing amongst the OpenStax Astronomy community. The OpenStax Astronomy textbook is a fully vetted free, online textbook for the nation and world; it is the most widely used textbook for undergraduate astronomy today.
