WIP: Strategies for Engaging Students in Active Learning in Online Settings

With the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts focusing on student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses have shifted towards engagement in online instruction, resulting in a need for increased understanding of how instructors adapt active learning from in person instruction to online learning. Active learning occurs in many different formats across different classrooms. Despite these broadly different formats, a common thread across all active learning is that using it in classrooms results in greater student engagement as compared to passive listening to lectures. Educational researchers have found that active learning has a positive impact on student outcomes, especially for underrepresented students in STEM.The research outlined in this paper seeks to understand how instructors are adapting from in person courses and the strategies they use to engage students in online STEM courses. To do this, we interviewed 20 instructors who were using active learning in teaching an online STEM course about the strategies they were using to engage their students in online activities. We coded these interviews using a grounded theory approach. After several rounds of coding, we found six overarching themes about how instructors viewed active learning in their online classrooms: Instructor Emotion, Instructor Strategy, Instructor Goal, Active Learning Example, Instructor Barrier, and Student Behavior. This paper focuses on the instructor strategy theme and its 55 individual codes.