Pixel International Conferences

Offenburg university offers pre-study extracurricular preparatory courses for future engineering students in mathemtics and physics. Due to pandemic restrictions, the two-week preparatory physics course preceeding winter term 2020/21 was presented as an online-only course. Students enrolled to the course attended eight online lectures of approximately 90 minutes duration followed by a group assignment. Both lectures and tutoring to the group assignment used a videoconference system with group sizes of 120 (lecture) and 6 (peer instruction and group assignments). The eight lectures focused on the high school physics curriculum of mechanics, electricity, thermodynamics and optics. Each lecture included four “peer instruction” questions to improve student activation. Student responses were collected using an audience response online tool. The “peer instruction” questions were discussed by the students in online groups of six students. These groups also received written group assignments consisting of common textbook exercises and additional problems with incomplete information. To solve these problems, groups were encouraged to discuss possible solutions. The on-line course attendance was monitored and showed a characteristic exponential “decay” curve with a half-life of approximately 18 lectures which is comparable to conventional courses: Around 73% of the students enrolled in the preparatory course attended all eight lectures. In addition to the attendance, the progress of the participants was monitored by two online tests: A pre-course online test the first course day and a post-course online test on the last day. The completion of both tests was highly recommanded, but not a formal requirement for the students. The fraction of students completing the pre-course, but not the post-course test was used as an estimate for the drop-out rate. Surprisingly, the drop-out rate of 37% (84 from 227 participants) was considerably lower in the online-course compared to the conventional preparatory courses.