(87c) Evaluating Performance in a Summer Online Thermodynamics Course Using a Concept Inventory

In our current context it seems essential to understand whether fully online course offerings are effective in achieving acceptable learning gains. Additionally, when teaching a foundational course over an abbreviated timeframe, instructors would benefit from confidence that learning gains are at least comparable to those from non-abbreviated offerings. This thermodynamics course is the sole course in its curriculum on the subject and covers 1^st and 2^nd law, equations of state, phase equilibrium, mixtures, and reaction equilibrium. It has a material and energy balances course as a pre-requisite. This presentation will summarize the offering and prior efforts at evaluation but will focus on the extension of evaluation of two cohorts by use of a targeted subset of a concept inventory (CI, by Vigeant et al.) for specific frequently misunderstood conceptual contrasts. Students were asked to complete the CI at the start of the course and then again and gains from pre- to post- were compared with previously published results using the same CI. Resulting gains in the summer course were comparable to prior results from full-term courses but lack statistical significance due to small numbers in the summer course offerings.