Learning and engagement with an online laboratory for environmental monitoring education

ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigated students’ learning outcomes and engagement with an online laboratory called Online Watershed Learning System (OWLS) employed within a classroom and explored the relationship between learning outcome and engagement. The OWLS is the web interface for a real-time environmental monitoring system and integrates a user-tracking system to track students’ interactions. We conducted a pre-experimental quantitative research study in a third-year Civil and Environmental Engineering course. We assessed students’ performance and perception of their learning, behavioural engagement, and their perception of engagement attributes in the context of environmental monitoring. Examples of key findings include: OWLS is effective in helping attain learning outcomes related to environmental monitoring, the order of assessment questions can impact students’ performance but not their engagement, and students’ performance is inversely related to the number of clicks they used to complete an OWLS-based task. The study informs the effective design of online laboratories and leverages online laboratories-based education.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental monitoring education
• online laboratories
• learning and engagement
• technology-enhanced learning

Acknowledgements

This work has been derived from the work discussed in the first author's PhD dissertation (Basu 2018). The first author of this paper was the PhD candidate and the second author was the supervisor, respectively, and dissertation was defended on 16th July 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debarati Basu

Dr. Debarati Basu is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Fundamentals Department in the College of Engineering at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University at the Daytona Beach campus. She earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech (VT). She received her bachelor's and master's in Computer Science and Engineering. She is interested in applied research at the intersection of Engineering Education (EE) and Computing Education Research (CER), which focuses on cyberlearning and engagement, curriculum design and assessment, and support programs that boost the academic success of different groups of students. For teaching, she uses evidence-based pedagogical practices, active learning techniques, and educational technologies for student engagement. She aims at bringing EE and CER into practice.

Vinod K. Lohani

Dr. Vinod Kumar Lohani is a professor of engineering education at Virginia Tech. His research interests are in computer-supported learning systems, engineering education, hydrology, and international collaboration. Currently, he is on assignment at the US National Science Foundation.