Education Article Habitable Worlds: Delivering on the Promises of Online Education Lev B. Horodyskyj, 1 Chris Mead, 1 Zack Belinson, 2 Sanlyn Buxner, 3 Steven Semken, 1 and Ariel D. Anbar 1,4 Abstract Critical thinking and scientific reasoning are central to higher education in the United States, but many courses (in-person and online) teach students information about science much more than they teach the actual process of science and its associated knowledge and skills. In the online arena specifically, the tools available for course construction exacerbate this problem by making it difficult to build the types of active learning activities that research shows to be the most effective. Here, we present a report on Habitable Worlds, offered by Arizona State University for 12 semesters over the past 6 years. This is a unique online course that uses an array of novel technologies to deliver an active, inquiry-driven learning experience. Learning outcomes and quantitative data from more than 3000 students demonstrate the success of our approach but also identify several remaining challenges. The design and development of this course offers valuable lessons for instructional designers and educators who are interested in fully capitalizing on the capabilities of 21 st -century technology to achieve educational goals. Key Words: Online education—Active learning—SETI—Astrobiology—Teaching. Astro- biology 17, 86–99. 1. Introduction A s societal problems and their solutions become more strongly dependent on a firm grasp of science and its methods, it becomes critically important to provide students with authentic and meaningful science-learning experiences. For this reason, Arizona State University (ASU), like most of its peer institutions, requires each of its degree-seeking un- dergraduates to complete at least one four-semester-hour laboratory science course. For many students, this course is a terminal science course (their last formal science instruction for the rest of their lives). This final experience with science will influence their personal attitudes and public engagement with scientific issues (e.g., Hobson, 2008). Universities are offering an increasing number of online courses, many of which rely solely on learning management systems (LMSs) such as Blackboard or Moodle to present course material. These tools provide limited templates for delivering content, favoring a passive, teacher-centered mode of instruction using video lectures and quizzes rather than enabling discovery and exploration. Research shows that this is inadequate for teaching the authentic nature of science (Songer and Linn, 1991; Freeman et al., 2014). In building Habitable Worlds, we aimed to address deficiencies in current online science education offerings to help ASU deliver on its mission of teaching science and scientific literacy to its stu- dents. Recently, the course has also been adopted by astro- biology faculty at other institutions who have similar needs. This highlights the need for a complete review and analysis of the course and our lessons learned. In this report, we describe our design decisions and rationale as well as present evalu- ation data that identify the strengths and weaknesses of this endeavor, with the aim of allowing others in the community to learn from our process and approach. 1.1. What’s been done before? The lecture-lab course structure common in undergraduate introductory-level science courses is designed to teach stu- dents both the products of scientific investigation (conveyed via lecture) and the process of scientific investigation (via lab). The lecture and lab components of this structure have been criticized as ineffective (Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004; Freeman et al., 2014). Too often the lecture portion of the class employs teacher-centered, passive learning (Freeman et al., 2014), while the lab portion focuses on verification 1 Center for Education Through eXploration and School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA. 2 Smart Sparrow, Sydney, Australia. 3 Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA. 4 School of Molecular Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA. ASTROBIOLOGY Volume 18, Number 1, 2018 ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/ast.2016.1550 86 Downloaded by Arizona State Univ from online.liebertpub.com at 01/19/18. For personal use only.