Designing Authentic Learning Experiences through Video Labs in a Higher Level Online Agriculture and Climate Change Course.

The reality of climate change and the need for adaptive strategies to cope with its impacts, especially in the agricultural sector, are becoming increasingly clear. Yet the incorporation of these themes into our educational system is lagging behind our scientific understanding of their importance. One reason for this is that the expertise and resources necessary to teach climate change and agriculture are not universally available across educational institutions. Online teaching provides a solution to this problem, but it gives rise to a second problem: how to incorporate labs, which are a necessary component of courses on this topic, in an online setting. Teaching climate change and agriculture effectively requires students to participate in authentic research experiences, both in the field and in the laboratory. The challenge that arises for instructors is how to provide authentic experiences to students through an online platform. While online foundational science courses often rely on send-away kits to provide hands-on experiences for students, this is not an option for advanced science courses that aim to teach complex protocols or demonstrate analytical instrumentation that is not available outside of a university campus. Our solution is a series of online video labs that aim to engage students and provide opportunities to learn about climate change and agriculture that meet the same learning objectives as those for a face-to-face course. We will present preliminary results of two groups of randomly assigned students: an intervention cohort (online video labs) and a comparison cohort (traditional, in-person labs) for a “Soils, Land Use, and Climate Change” undergraduate course at Colorado State University. The findings will inform other institutions who face similar constraints in providing online courses and will allow increased accessibility of those across the country who cannot attend the few institutions that have necessary laboratory setups to teach such courses.