Student Engagement with Course Material - How do I make this Equitable? (to the best of my ability right now)

In designing this online course this was perhaps my biggest concern - knowing the typical pressures on our students and then adding on top the new COVID-related pressures - how could I present the content of my course to help all students succeed?

What is the course material for a Chemistry class?

A typical chemistry class is massively content driven. There is a lot of information to get through in the semester (frequently in preparation for the next semester/course in the sequence) and students need a lot of guidance.
- Students also need a lot of practice to learn the material well. (This leads into the next topic --> Assessment)
For this class specifically, CHEM 108 (Intro Chem), this class covers topics from general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry, all in 1 semester!
- Read this as --> this class was fast! Typically a chapter per week for 15 weeks.

What Learning Materials did I give my students?

General Background and Key Skills to master
Readings from Textbook (for reference)
Lecture notes - both blank and completed notes
Lecture videos - on average 6 videos per week (~20 mins per video)

Equity concern: Not all students can or will or will be able to engage with the lecture videos

A Solution:
Provide low-tech and high-tech options for engagement with the course content

Low tech:

blank lecture notes (word & PDF), open outline format notes
completed lecture notes (PDF), filled in versions (from the videos) of the blank notes

High tech:

lecture videos (15-20 minute videos, typically 5-7 videos for each week)

- videos were auto-captioned by Kaltura

- - Note: I did not have time to edit all of the captions in the videos. With a jargon heavy subject plus how the computer interprets my speech, I know the captions were not fully accurate. This will need to be rectified the next time I teach the class and absolutely must be done if a student has an accommodation plan requiring it.

- videos were set to be downloadable to help save data for the student (less streaming)

So, with these options provided - what did the students actually use?

Lecture Videos:

Based on the Canvas Analytics tools, here is what I "think" I know: (see data and graph below)
(Did you know you can run analytics on your course videos?! --> How to access Kaltura Media Analytics)

Average # of Users

I had a class of 24 students and the Canvas shell included me and two other substitute instructors for a total of 27 users that could click into and watch the videos.

Throughout the class, it seems that most of the students watched most of the videos for each lesson.
- The data below show an average for all of the videos for that Lesson (week). Even at the end of the semester, 19/24 students were still watching the videos!

Average Count Plays

The Average Count Plays column gives me an idea of how many times the videos were played (by each user) compared to the other videos (week by week or lesson by lesson)

I can see a drop off in how much the videos were used from week to week. This likely correlates to the difficulty of the material that week as well as early in the semester vs late in the semester.
Much more analysis could be done on this data (& other analytics data) and more potential insights could be gathered.
- If you know how to better read the analytical data files please let me know in the discussion!

Average Completion Rate

The Average Completion Rate column gives me an idea of if the students likely watched most of the videos.

Not surprisingly, the completion rates generally show that these students watched the videos to 75-80% completion most weeks, with an expected drop-off near the end of the semester.

Conclusions

The data largely match with what the students told me in the feedback forums and at the end of the semester.
- Many said they watched the videos each week and liked being able to go back and re-watch parts of the lecture.
- No comments were made about the captions or the ability to download the videos so I am unsure how much these features were used.

	Avg. Count Plays	Avg. Comp. Rate	Avg. # of users
Lesson 1	25.6	76	25
Lesson 2	23.0	76	22
Lesson 3	26.0	84	22
Lesson 4	22.3	85	21
Lesson 5	24.2	79	21
Lesson 6	23.7	78	23
Lesson 7	24.7	74	22
Lesson 8	21.3	81	22
Lesson 9/10	23.2	76	25
Lesson 11	19.4	81	20
Lesson 12	20.0	71	21
Lesson 13	19.4	79	19
Lesson 14/15	17.1	72	19

Lecture Notes:

The Canvas analytics tool does give me a list of the resources that the students accessed in the course, however it seems incomplete in its data. Many students, in their mid-semester feedback to me, told me that they routinely downloaded the blank lecture notes as well as the completed lecture notes as part of their studying for the week. The analytics file doesn't clearly show this -or- I need to look more closely at the data to see if there is a measure of how often a file was loaded/downloaded.

Conclusions:
- Taking student's at their word - many of them made good use of the blank lecture notes while watching the videos (which was my intention) and did not immediately jump to only using the completed lecture notes.
- I was not aware of any student that had to or chose to only rely on the lecture notes and could not watch the lecture videos - so their effectiveness as a stand-alone is inconclusive based on this class.
- I will continue to offer blank and completed lecture notes in an effort to give students options in how they would like to study for the class.
  - I will have to ask more detailed questions in class feedback survey's to perhaps gain a sense of how exactly students are using the materials.