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.