2. Materials and Methods
We used The Wildlife Society’s (TWS) list of online higher education ecology-focused courses as a guide for identifying and classifying our initial categories of learning objectives (The Wildlife Society, 2020). First, we reviewed the fields of study (e.g., categories of ecology-focused courses) for courses offered online that were listed on the TWS website. Specific fields of study listed included Biology, Botany, Communications, Ecology, Humanities, Physical Sciences, Policy, Administration and Law, Quantitative Sciences, Statistics, Sustainability, Wildlife and Natural Resource Management, Wildlife Biology, and Zoology. Collectively, we have taught courses in most of these fields of study; we only lack higher education instructional experience in courses dedicated to the Humanities field of study. After reviewing the fields of study, we used our collective experience to develop five learning objective categories that were broad enough to encompass course-specific learning objectives for the ecology-focused fields of study. Our initial learning objective categories were (1) Identification, (2) Application of Hypothesis/Theory, (3) Management of Natural Resources, (4) Development of Professional Skills, and (5) Evaluation/Application of Concepts.
Next, we gathered information directly through institutional websites and Google searches to verify our initial categorization of course-specific learning objectives for online courses that aligned with the list on the TWS website. We browsed course catalogs and departmental pages to locate syllabi for courses considered to align with fields similar to those listed on the TWS website. In cases where syllabi were not linked on institutional pages, we used key term Google searches to find available syllabi for courses. Key terms included the name of the institution paired with a field of study and the words “syllabus” and “online.” We only obtained syllabi for courses currently offered at an institute; however, course syllabi were not restricted to the current academic year. Dates listed on procured syllabi ranged from 1999-2020. Additionally, some syllabi that we obtained were listed as “example syllabi,” meaning they were from a previous year of the course, but the date was removed. We were not able to obtain syllabi from every institution listed on the TWS website due to limited accessibility. However, we did obtain syllabi from every field of study listed on TWS webpage. After reviewing the learning objectives for all of the syllabi, we deemed it necessary to modify our initial categories of learning objectives. We noted that (1) application of concepts, in addition to application of hypotheses and theories, appeared to be a consistent theme, and (2) evaluation alone, instead of evaluation/application combined, also appeared to be a consistent theme. Therefore, we modified our initial categories of learning objectives to better align with course-specific learning objectives. Our final five categories of learning objectives, based on similarities among the learning objectives listed throughout the course syllabi we reviewed, were (1) Identification, (2) Application of Concepts/Hypotheses/Theories, (3) Management of Natural Resources, (4) Development of Professional Skills, and (5) Evaluation of Concepts/Practices.
Finally, we categorized every course-specific learning objective listed on each syllabus into one of our five learning objective categories. Specifically, one person categorized all of the course-specific learning objectives based on keyword terms and synonyms of keyword terms we developed for each of our learning objective categories (Table 1). For example, keyword terms for our Identification learning objective category included (1) define, (2) describe, (3) identify, (4) learn, and (5) understand. Many course-specific learning objectives were broad and encompassed several keywords, thereby matching more than one of our categories. For example, where identification of a term was a learning outcome, the course-specific learning objective often also included the application of the term; therefore, this particular learning objective would align with our Identification category and our Application of Concepts/Hypotheses/Theories category. In cases like this one, the broadly-written course-specific learning objective was given credit for multiple categories (Table 1; Figure 2; Appendix A). It should be noted that the intent of this categorization scheme is not to rank the quality of courses or make an assertion that a course is lacking in certain aspects. The sole purpose of the exercise was to determine if our five learning objective categories indeed explained most course-specific learning objectives that were listed on syllabi across many ecology-focused courses.