Learning Physics in a Virtual Environment: Is There Any?

With nearly one in five college students taking at least one course online, with nearly every major college and university offering courses and/or programs online and with a growing number of citizens in the work place wanting and needing education in ways which fit their work and personal schedules, e-learning is becoming more important and ubiquitous each year. The supply (courses) is there in many disciplines; the demand (students and non-students) is there. The unanswered question is: How good is the product? Is learning taking place? How do we measure the learning effectiveness of online courses? Are some courses more amenable than others to e-learning? In particular, is it possible to effectively teach pedagogically sound science courses online? There is little research on many of these questions. Of interest to legislators is another important question: Is online learning cost effective? There is a paucity of data here as well, although some argue that it is possible to have e-learning which is cost effective at the margin [1, 38] provided that an instructional design model is used wherein there is no one ‘at the end of the phone’ – a model very different from that currently used in the online community. We have collected data from student use of a highly interactive, virtual physics laboratory that answers some of these questions. Data are from an introductory, algebrabased introductory physics course taken mostly by pre-professionals in health fields during the 2005-2006 academic year. Preand postFCI tests were administered in the fall semester when students studied mechanics. Results show that a cadre of students taking ‘classwork’ in a virtual, highly interactive physics laboratory environment have normalized gains [4] on the FCI test [12] which is greater than that of a similar cadre of students in a (physical) modified Modeling Workshop [8] laboratory environment and considerably larger than those in a lecture environment [4].