Habitable Worlds: Delivering on the Promises of Online Education.

Critical thinking and scientific reasoning are central to higher education in the United States, but many courses (in-person and online) teach students information about science much more than they teach the actual process of science and its associated knowledge and skills. In the online arena specifically, the tools available for course construction exacerbate this problem by making it difficult to build the types of active learning activities that research shows to be the most effective. Here, we present a report on Habitable Worlds, offered by Arizona State University for 12 semesters over the past 6 years.

Students in Fully Online Programs Report More Positive Attitudes toward Science Than Students in Traditional, In-Person Programs.

Following the growth of online, higher-education courses, academic institutions are now offering fully online degree programs. Yet it is not clear how students who enroll in fully online degree programs are similar to those students who enroll in in-person ("traditional") degree programs. Because previous work has shown students' attitudes toward science can affect their performance in a course, it is valuable to ask how attitudes toward science differ between these two populations.