DOI: 10.5061/dryad.b8gtht79q
title: Engaging online students by activating ecological knowledge

description: The current COVID-19 pandemic has forced the global higher education
 community to rapidly adapt to partially- or fully-online course offerings.
 For field- or lab-based courses in ecological curricula, this presents
 unique challenges. Fortunately, a diverse set of active learning
 techniques exist, and these techniques translate well to online settings.
 However, limited guidance and resources exist for developing,
 implementing, and evaluating active learning assignments that fulfil
 specific objectives of ecology-focused courses. To address these
 informational gaps, we (1) identify broad learning objectives across a
 variety of ecology-focused courses, (2) provide examples, based on our
 collective online teaching experience, of active learning activities that
 are relevant to the identified ecological learning objectives, and (3)
 provide guidelines for successful implementation of active learning
 assignments in online courses. Using The Wildlife Society’s list of online
 higher education ecology-focused courses as a guide, we obtained syllabi
 from 45 ecology-focused courses, comprising a total of 321 course-specific
 learning objectives. We classified all course-specific learning objectives
 into at least one of five categories: (1) Identification, (2) Application
 of Concepts/Hypotheses/Theories, (3) Management of Natural Resources, (4)
 Development of Professional Skills, or (5) Evaluation of
 Concepts/Practices. We then provided two examples of active learning
 activities for each of the five categories, along with guidance on their
 implementation in online settings. We suggest that, when based on sound
 pedagogy, active learning techniques can enhance the online student’s
 experience by activating ecological knowledge.
description: We used The Wildlife Society’s (TWS) list of online higher
 education ecology-focused courses as a guide for identifying and
 classifying our initial categories of learning objectives (The Wildlife
 Society, 2020). First, we reviewed the fields of study (e.g., categories
 of ecology-focused courses) for courses offered online that were listed on
 the TWS website. Specific fields of study listed included: Biology;
 Botany; Communications; Ecology; Humanities; Physical Sciences; Policy,
 Administration, and Law; Quantitative Sciences; Statistics;
 Sustainability; Wildlife and Natural Resource Management; Wildlife
 Biology; and Zoology. Collectively, we have taught courses in most of
 these fields of study; we only lack higher education instructional
 experience in courses dedicated to the Humanities field of study. After
 reviewing the fields of study, we used our collective experience to
 develop a preliminary list of five learning objective categories that we
 postulated were broad enough to encompass all of the course-specific
 learning objectives for the ecology-focused fields of study.
 Next, we gathered information directly through institutional
 websites and Google searches to verify our initial categorization of
 course-specific learning objectives for online courses that aligned with
 the list on the TWS website. We browsed course catalogs and departmental
 pages to locate syllabi for courses considered to align with fields
 similar to those listed on the TWS website. In cases where syllabi were
 not linked on institutional pages, we used key term Google searches to
 find available syllabi for courses. Key terms included the name of the
 institution paired with a field of study and the words “syllabus” and
 “online.” We only obtained syllabi for courses currently offered at an
 institute; however, course syllabi were not restricted to the current
 academic year. Dates listed on procured syllabi ranged from 1999-2020.
 Additionally, some syllabi that we obtained were listed as “example
 syllabi,” meaning they were from a previous year of the course, but the
 date was removed. We were not able to obtain syllabi from every
 institution listed on the TWS website due to limited accessibility.
 However, we did obtain syllabi from every field of study listed on TWS
 webpage. Then, we compared the course-specific learning
 objectives to the initial framework for our five learning objective
 categories. We made slight modifications to two of our preliminary
 categories to better align them with consistent themes across the procured
 course-specific learning objectives. Our final five categories of learning
 objectives were (1) Identification, (2) Application of
 Concepts/Hypotheses/Theories, (3) Management of Natural Resources, (4)
 Development of Professional Skills, and (5) Evaluation of
 Concepts/Practices. Finally, we categorized every
 course-specific learning objective listed on each syllabus into one of our
 five learning objective categories. Specifically, one person categorized
 all of the course-specific learning objectives based on keyword terms and
 synonyms of keyword terms we developed for each of our learning objective
 categories. For example, keyword terms for our Identification learning
 objective category included (1) define, (2) describe, (3) identify, (4)
 learn, and (5) understand. Many course-specific learning objectives were
 broad and encompassed several keywords, thereby matching more than one of
 our categories. For example, where identification of a term was a learning
 outcome, the course-specific learning objective also often included the
 application of the term; therefore, this particular learning objective
 would align with our Identification category and our Application of
 Concepts/Hypotheses/Theories category. In cases like this one, the
 broadly-written course-specific learning objective was given credit for
 multiple categories. It should be noted that the intent of this
 categorization scheme is not to rank the quality of courses or make an
 assertion that a course is lacking in certain aspects. The sole purpose of
 the exercise was to determine if our five learning objective categories
 indeed explained most course-specific learning objectives that were listed
 on syllabi across many ecology-focused courses.