Using Instructional Media to Improve Student Learning Outcomes in an Online Toxicology Course - a Case Study

This case study investigated how student interaction patterns (Moore, 1993) with different instructional media in a graduate level online environmental toxicology course impacted student outcomes, as measured by grades and student engagement levels. Student engagement levels were measured as Posts, Access, Time, and Hits (PATHs) by using the PATHs Framework (Adebowale, 2017) approach to quantify learning analytics obtained from a Learning Management System. Data was obtained from 13 online students during the fall 2018 semester. Findings indicate that Narrated PowerPoint and Shaky Hand video led to higher student outcomes compared to the other forms of instructional media. Implications for course design, quality assurance mechanisms, assessments, improvement of student outcomes, and criteria for selecting the type of instructional media to use in online courses are also discussed.