Structure and Goals of the Homework Assignments
The weekly homework assignments acted as a precursor to the weekly discussion activity. Homework assignments were intended to prepare students for the discussion activities by reinforcing concepts covered in class, linking course topics together, refreshing foundational concepts covered in previous biology courses and/or illustrating research applications of course topics. While the video homeworks and in-class discussion activities focused on different scientists and different research programs, they highlighted research on the same general topic (ex: trade offs). Prior to the term included in this study, the homework assignments consisted of multiple choice quizzes on course topics but did not include online video.
In the fall 2019 term, students enrolled in the course (n = 356) were given weekly homework assignments consisting of viewing one or two online educational videos and responding to 7-8 multiple choice questions relating to the video(s), which were accessed through the course management system. Table 1 summarizes the demographics of students enrolled in the course while Table 2 summarizes the online videos used in the homework assignments. Videos were selected from three common open-access sources for biology education: iBiology, HHMI BioInteractive, and Bozeman Science. Because this was the first term in which online video was incorporated into the weekly homework assignments for the course, we sought to understand the student perspective on the use of videos for learning ecology and evolution. To that end, open-ended student feedback on the homework assignments was gathered in two ways: