We’re excited to share the news of the success that Dr. Arias and team have had driving student engagement in online sections of non-majors Biology at Tougaloo College using Junction Biology. Tougaloo students have a median family income of $26K (less than half the average of $54K for all colleges) and the majority of them are first-generation students. In this case, students are also non-science majors, learning online, who may become bored or overwhelmed with scientific terms and facts that they don’t believe have any utility in their daily lives.
One of Dr. Arias main teaching goals is to increase student engagement in face to face and online classes. In her face to face classes, she is making her classes more interactive with activities applied to real case scenarios and is also following the flipped classroom model. For the past two years Dr. Arias has tried to improve the design and content of her online classes to make them more appealing to students without success until the implementation of Junction Education.
Junction seamlessly integrated with Tougaloo’s LMS providing turnkey, first day of class, access for all enrolled students and the rich media and variety of learning activities to suit different learning styles helped keep students engaged during the semester.
Junction saves students money, but also delivers a superior experience, promoting deeper engagement and social interaction leading towards higher completion rates and better learning outcomes.
Curious about Junction Biology? Take a look here to learn more about the course and feel free to drop us a line to see if we might be able to help with your evaluation of engaging, effective and affordable adaptive courseware.
2016 DLIAward Recipient – Junction Biology at Tougaloo College – OLC
One of the main challenges faced by instructors of online biology classes is the lack of student engagement. Since they do not get to perform hands on experiments or science related activities, many get easily bored or overwhelmed with scientific terminology and facts that they feel do not have any use in their daily lives.
