STEMbling Toward Student Success: Evaluating EdTech’s Impact in STEM Courses

Educational technology goes by many names, and encompases a variety of fields, tools, and pedagogical approaches. Whether you call it learning, academic, instructional, or educational technology, or you prefer shorter terms like “edtech” or “e-learning,” recent years have seen an ever-increasing focus on how technology can help students learn better, become more engaged in the learning process, and become part of a community both on-campus and off. Couple this with the nation’s continued focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning, and more often than not you get the perfect combination of technology innovation and extinction that makes evaluating its impact both difficult and imperative. Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) at NC State University provides grants to faculty interested in redesigning (often) traditional lecture-based courses, and faculty have been keen to learn about effective technology integration and its impact on their students. The road toward student success is not often smooth, and this session reflects that. Specifically, it centers on how DELTA evaluates the use and impact of edtech in STEM courses, focusing on student engagement and success. In addition, it highlights the tools and procedures used to conduct these evaluations, and how they continue to evolve and grow. Attendees will learn about these tools and how they might implement them at their own institutions, and they will discuss the evidence of impact DELTA has gathered over the years. Technologies discussed include Learning Management Systems (LMS), video lectures, classroom polling tools, adaptive learning, and others. Discussion and sharing of attendees’ experiences will be a major focus of the session.