Explanations and Interactives Improve Subjective Experiences in Online Courseware

As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design choices and to measure the effects of these choices on students’ subjective experiences (engagement, mind wandering, and interest) in addition to objective learning outcomes. More...