The case for flexibility in online science courses: Strategies and caveats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created an unpredictable and stressful situation for both students and instructors. With current instruction largely occurring in an online environment, we propose that increased flexibility in course structure will best support student learning. Flexible course structure offers a trauma-aware approach to teaching, is in line with the Universal Design for Learning, and increases student motivation and meaningful learning. It can also provide more authentic experiences akin to science-based careers. We provide several specific suggestions for incorporating flexibility in one's class, as well as outline considerations and caveats. Our hope is that flexibility necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to inspire change in future course design and educational paradigms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.064 | 0.102 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.036 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".