A challenge we had in the redesign of CLIM1001 - Introduction to Climate Change was how to engage large numbers of students with complex, interdisciplinary (e.g., chemistry, physics, psychology, law, computing) concepts in an online space. Our backward design approach helped us to realise that while the concepts were complex, because this was a general education course, our main aim was to get students to be able to think critically across a range of interdisciplinary topics rather than recall lots of specialist content. However, we also had to try to ensure that students from various degree programs would still be intellectually stimulated by the course material . We needed to find a good balance between intellectual engagement at a university level versus cognitive overload for non-specialists. Our solution was to try to make the material engaging by:

• Utilising humour and popular culture.

Our CLIM1001 promo video (embedded below) is a quintessential example of this. In collaboration with a professional videographer and my colleague Gab Abramowitz (co-designer of this course), I wrote, story boarded and filmed a vox-pop video during O-week with comedian Cameron Knight as the host. The video makes the point that while many (young) people are very concerned about anthropogenic climate change, they often don't actually have much substantial knowledge or understanding of it. Our lessons are curated with high quality creative commons videos which further help explain threshold concepts. Every week includes a "just for fun" page with further links that students enjoyed exploring and discussing. 

• Ensuring teacher presence 

 A significant challenge in asynchronous online courses is ensuring a strong teacher presence. Teacher presence is key to students maintaining engagement and feeling supported (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2001). We also know that long videos such as recorded lectures are ineffective. Instead, we used short intro videos for each week where the course coordinator interviews the guest lecturer who contributed to the course material in our Moodle lessons, weekly updates from the coordinator and course discussion for direct access to the coordinator with encouragements to use private email for confidential discussions. Finally, incorporating instructors into the group role play exercise also ensured that there was teacher presence in the main assessment activity.  I found these strategies to work well as indicated by the steady stream of correspondences on Moodle and by the number of students who addressed me by my first name in posts, emails and in my experience student feedback.   

• Ensuring a sense of community

Students often feel isolated in online courses. We tried to ensure a strong sense of community in the course by providing activities which required student interaction such as group work and the requirement of a minimum number of discussion posts. While the discussion post requirement is often not questioned, group work is often not well received by many students citing that they do not wish for their marks to be affected by others' efforts or that group work was inappropriate in an online course. I have perservered with this mode because we often find that by the end of the course, most students have achieved a collegiate and respectful relationship with team members. I address the issue head on making a case that online project work is a common activity in modern workplaces. The teaching team has also attempted to address students' concerns by minimising assessment weightings and using UNSW's Team Eval Moodle plug-in. Students rate their fellow team members' participation for each phase which gives them more individual agency in the assessment process.   

It is worth noting that none of the above strategies use any ground breaking technology. I am a firm believer in exploring new technologies but reflecting deeply on the utility, necessity and added value of these for a given learning outcome. In CLIM1001, we wanted a high level of control over the tools used for easy trouble shooting and to ensure long term stability and longevity for the course.      

References

D. Randy Garrison , Terry Anderson & Walter Archer(2001) Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing indistance education, American Journal of Distance Education, 15:1, 7-23, DOI:10.1080/08923640109527071
(17) (PDF) Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing in Distance Education. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245816834_Critical_Thinking_Cognitive_Presence_and_Computer_Conferencing_in_Distance_Education