Chemistry education research and practice in diverse online learning environments: resilience, complexity and opportunity!

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Abstract

It would be difficult to step into 2021 without acknowledging the shifting sands, and sometimes sinkholes, that we have experienced as chemistry educators during 2020. COVID-19 could be construed to have been a perfect storm in chemistry education research and practice. Or perhaps it represents a threshold that has been crossed involving the creation of teaching dissonance.

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Resilience: a COVID-19 response in practice

The precipitous shift into 100% remote learning in 2020 was unplanned. While there were instructors who possessed existing online teaching experience, along with a library of resources for teaching and assessing in remote learning environments, most instructors were ‘caught on the hop’. This situation became clearly evident through social media, such as Twitter and Facebook groups, which saw collegial support spring up as teachers shared their experiences, challenges and solutions. Indeed the editors of the Journal of Chemical Education, in their COVID-19 special issue (Holme, 2020), captured diverse teaching responses including exemplars of innovations in practice by a broad group of international educators.

Pre-COVID-19, blended learning had presented many affordances to support active learning in the classroom involving the adoption of educational technologies (Garrison and Kanuka, 2004). We had seen flipped classrooms emerge as an important pedagogical strategy in chemistry education, typically facilitated through engaging students with online resources prior to their engagement in the face-to-face lecture or classroom activities (Seery, 2015).

While teaching practice appeared to adopt a flexible response, COVID-19 disrupted the processes of data collection for many chemistry education researchers. Ethically approved methodologies became more complex to implement than originally planned, however data collection was still feasible through amendments involving technology enhancement, such as remote interviews (Chatha and Bretz, 2020; Trate et al., 2020). This approach builds upon recognised novel and trustworthy methods for collection of rich online interview data involving geographically diverse participants (Pratt and Yezierski, 2018). In reality though, in 2020, many existing studies now have a ‘gap’, ‘blip’, ‘outlier’ or ‘random event’ in their findings which will require iteration or adaptation of the study to resolve.

Anecdotally, instructors around the world shared that what they had missed the most during remote 2020 COVID-19 teaching was their face-to-face synchronous interactions with their students. Their reasons mostly related to interactivity in their teaching practice including: the ability to ‘read’ student faces; eliciting and monitoring their students’ thinking in-situ; providing ‘on the spot’ feedback; and getting students to talk to each other. These reasons represent teachers’ values and beliefs about how students learn linked to their pedagogical content knowledge (Gess-Newsome, 2015), thus spotlighting the perceived importance of the instructor–student interaction. Early career academics in particular perhaps faced the greatest challenges through a lack of teaching experience to inform the process of translating their courses online.

Imagine a different scenario. What if, 12 months ago, there had been a deliberate strategy to translate teaching and assessment practice into remote learning environments (fully funded, resourced and including preparation time)? Researchers and practitioners would likely have turned to the education research literature for guidance on their instructional design and to orchestrate the processes – indeed a rich body of research into student learning in online, remote environments and distance education already exists. The COVID-19 experience is perhaps timely in reminding us that the view often looks different depending on the perspective that has been adopted. It is important to take a step back and adopt a landscape view of our field in terms of cognitive science and learning theories whilst applying a lens of remote online learning. Indeed, just as the atom does not know whether there is a chemist, physicist, biologist or engineer who is investigating its structure and properties, the process of learning can be explored through the lenses of many different disciplinary tribes as they seek to understand how to guide students in constructing their understanding.

Complexity: online and remote education are well characterised paradigms

‘Online’, ‘remote’, ‘distance’, ‘hybrid’, or ‘blended’ learning environments have become well-characterised contexts involving research across multiple decades. The importance and nature of the interactions between instructors, learners and content are well-established as critical to designing successful remote learning environments. Moore laid an important foundation for contemporary practice by identifying three types of interaction in his seminal editorial article (Moore, 1989) that have contributed to effective distance education. A meta-analysis of research 20 years later demonstrated the sustained importance of these interaction types and their impact on learning in distance education (Bernard et al., 2009). A 4th type of interaction has also been identified as very important in the form of student–technology interactions (Hillman et al., 1994), raising important questions relating to the potential impact of the digital divide, digital equity and students’ digital literacy on student learning.

The landmark Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework has been widely and successfully used to explore student engagement in blended and online learning environments (Garrison, 2016; Garrison and Kanuka, 2004). The basis of the CoI framework is that deep and meaningful learning is best supported when a community of learners is engaged in critical reflection and discourse involving teaching, cognitive and social presence. In an attempt to emphasise the potential interplay between Moore's types of interaction and the CoI framework, I have endeavoured to integrate them as a graphical display (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Graphical representation of the potential interplay between Moore's interactivities and Garrison's CoI framework. The text in light grey provides examples of specific pedagogies or strategies that could bridge the interactions.

An example of the utility and application of the CoI to inform the translation of resources and activities into a remote chemistry course as part of a COVID-19 response was recently shared (Tan et al., 2020). The authors sought to retain peer interactions and active learning in their online course, and they collected student perceptions as evaluative data while acknowledging that more extensive data was not accessible at short notice.

I would also like to recognise an article published in the very first issue of Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP). Varjola (2000) described a case study investigating Finnish high school students’ engagement with the internet as they sought information about ozone and subsequently engaged in discussion. While this research was novel when it appeared, it has not been highly cited, perhaps reflecting the appetite for digital learning at the time. The study refers to ‘computer-mediated communication’ and reinforces the notion that we have been concerned about how chemistry students interact with technologies and their peers for a long time.

A review of articles that explore interactivity in online or remote environments published in our journal distils several examples that can be linked to Moore's typology but also align with the CoI framework (Table 1). The absence of an example of specific instructor–learner interactions in online or remote environments in CERP perhaps represents an opportunity for a future exploration of the influence of teaching presence. An example of this type of study is found in research that has explored meaningful dialogue between instructors and students during comparison of online office hours and face-to-face recitations (Weaver et al., 2009).

Table 1 Chemistry Education Research and Practice articles that provide examples of research in blended, hybrid or online environments linked to Moore's interaction types

Moore's interaction	Context	Strategy	Data collected (affective measures)	Ref.
Learner–content	General chemistry	Integration of traditional, flipped and distance education resources.	Diagnostic of prior knowledge	Bernard et al., 2017
			Exam outcomes (5 year study)
	Molecular symmetry and group theory	Integration of visualization applets into a hybrid course.	Student attitudes	Antonoglou et al., 2011
			Course grades
	Introductory chemistry	Comparison of a traditional lecture lab course with an online delivery of the same.	Pass/fail rates	Faulconer et al., 2018
			Exam outcomes
	Introduction to inorganic chemistry	Systematic comparison of online only and face-to-face in a lecture only courses.	ASCIv2 (attitudes towards learning chemistry scale)	Nennig et al., 2020
			Exam outcomes
Learner–instructor	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Learner–learner	Computers for chemistry (upper level), social presence	Use of discussion boards to engage students with peers in online course.	Discussion board posts	Seery, 2012
			Student perceptions
			Student grades
	Organic chemistry	Collaborative assignment shared between students in US and Canadian universities.	Interviews	Skagen et al., 2018
	Communication & confidence		Reflections
			Questionnaires
Learner-interface	General chemistry, level of scaffolding	Student engagement with PhET simulations.	Click data	Chamberlain et al., 2014
			Field notes
			Student drawings
	General chemistry	Student engagement with PhET simulations.	Click data	Moore et al., 2013
	Usability		Audio recordings
			Clicker questions

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Several studies shared in Table 1 involve engaging students in discussion or visualisation tools in online environments which can be considered to be core pedagogical strategies in chemistry education.

Disciplinary discourse and multiple representations in chemistry education research

Discourse and student explanations are regarded as fundamental to developing students’ disciplinary language and terminology in chemistry while also providing insights into their understanding of concepts. Readers might consult the special issue of CERP (Markic and Childs, 2016) exploring the role of language in teaching chemistry to consider examples of interactions that could be potentially captured online.

Both teacher and student-generated representations remain central to chemistry education research and practice. Different domains in chemistry education research have considered learning using multiple external representations and multimodal resources for several decades. Much of this work involves digital resources and online environments to share or generate external representations. A special issue of CERP (Kelly and Akaygun, 2019) included many studies that explored online visualisation resources including animations and simulations. These have potential to be adopted as part of the instructional design of online, hybrid or blended learning courses.

In moving forward to investigate the impact of learning online on chemistry students’ representational competence and their explanations, we might consider drawing on theoretical underpinnings such as Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2019) and Ainsworth's design, function, tasks framework (Ainsworth, 2006) to explore the modes and combinations of representations that are effective in online learning within our discipline. For example, Antonoglou et al. (2011) applied both frameworks, as well as the CoI framework, to inform their instructional design involving multiple representational resources.

While I highlight two special issues in our journal as sources of inspiration above, it is important to acknowledge the many, many more examples of research and practice focussing on online discourse, argumentation, explanations, representations and visualisation found in CERP and in the wider body of chemistry education research literature that can also inform instructional design.

Opportunity: the way forward

COVID-19 catapulted many instructors into uncharted territory; most were under-prepared for what lay beneath the surface of this new context however many have recognised the opportunities for new journeys that could be taken with their students’ learning. There is no doubt that teaching and learning will not return to ‘business as usual’ in the way it looked pre-COVID-19; we have experienced a threshold event! Even if a return to ‘normal’ is feasible, our students have experienced a significant impact on their learning which will influence how they engage in their future studies. Cooper and Stowe (2018) noted the potential affordances of learning technologies and online environments as important contexts for chemistry education research. However they also noted that there has been ‘little evidence that localizing all or part of a course on the web has any significant (positive) impact on learning’. This observation is reinforced by findings reported in two studies included in Table 1 (Faulconer et al., 2018; Nennig et al., 2020). It is reassuring to know that it is feasible to intentionally shift teaching and learning online with minimal negative impact. However, there is much work to be done by researchers and practitioners to understand the nature of student engagement and how their chemistry discipline-specific learning outcomes might be improved in a post-COVID world!

As we progress into 2021, at CERP we are looking forward to publishing research and evidence-based practice studies that inform readers in regard to how students engage in constructing their understanding of chemistry concepts and develop their skills within a variety of traditional, hybrid, blended and remote chemistry learning environments.

In 2020, we received a record number of submissions so, at the risk of seeming tiresome, a gentle reminder of the three levels of chemistry education research that we accept (Taber, 2013; Seery et al., 2019) framed in the context of online environments seems timely.

• Inherent: research that is intrinsic to teaching and learning in chemistry as a curriculum subject. For example, representational competence, student explanations of chemistry concepts or capturing their thinking explored in online contexts.

• Embedded: research that examines general issues in teaching and learning in the context of chemistry. For example peer-assessment, facilitating group work or provision of formative feedback in online environments.

• Collateral: research which explores questions that are not directly related to teaching and learning in chemistry is not accepted. In this category, the chemistry context tends to be incidental to the study. For example, a technology, remote experiment, or online resource is not of value in isolation – there needs to be an examination of the impact of teaching and learning in chemistry.

A number of manuscripts were turned away in the past 12 months, not because the quality of the study or submission did not meet our standard for publication, but simply because the work was not a good fit (did not meet the criteria) for our journal. These studies were mostly categorised as collateral because there was no supporting evidence in the form of assessment of students’ chemistry learning outcomes; evidence of students’ chemistry thinking; exploration of attitudes towards chemistry or gains in chemistry professional skills.

Whilst being armed with pedagogical strategies and ways of knowing about how students learn chemistry remotely might be too late to manage the events of 2020, the experience provides us with the incentive to prepare our readers for 21st century chemistry education research, teaching and learning in the context of a new landscape of practice.

A final thought. As I embark on my role as the new Editor-in-Chief, I feel fortunate to have been entrusted with leading CERP into a future that is rich in opportunity for research informed practice. A strong foundation has been established for me to build on through Michael Seery's and Keith Taber's visions for the journal's community and audience. I don’t take this lightly and truly appreciate the ongoing support of our excellent Associate Editorial team (Nicole Graulich, Ajda Kahveci and Scott Lewis) as we guide our authors towards the dissemination of their research.

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