Assessing learning in ESS 101w Walking for Fitness

ESS 101w serves four course level student learning outcomes:

1.0 Physical fitness
Explain physical fitness and wellness, as well as their importance to overall health, disease prevention, and athletic performance and value regular physical activity and its contribution to a healthful lifestyle.

2.0 Physical activities
Identify fitness components and perform the physical tests to determine strengths and weaknesses necessary to perform a variety of physical activities.

3.0 Exercise regimes
Design and demonstrate exercise regimes appropriate to improve health, physical fitness, and athletic performance.

4.0 Values and effects
Demonstrate the values and effect of walking skills needed to gain wellness, physical fitness and to maintain healthy lifestyle. 

The four course level outcomes serve two general education program level outcomes:

Gen Ed 5.1  Determine healthy lifestyles by describing the value of physical activity to a healthful lifestyle and participating in regular physical activity for at least one semester.

Gen Ed 5.2  Demonstrate professionalism, interpersonal skills, teamwork, leadership and decision making skills.

As noted in past work on the institutional learning outcomes, these two general education program learning outcomes do not currently directly map to an institutional learning outcome.

Due to a global pandemic, this course was delivered online. Students were required to walk a mile a day at least five days a week. Their walking was documented by the use of fitness apps on a mobile device that used GPS tracking to measure distance and produce a map of where the student walked. Each week the students were to post screenshots of the five walks to a private social learning group in Facebook.

The choice of Facebook was done with reservations. The use of Facebook, however, provided a number of benefits that the learning management system could not replicate. Facebook permits the posting by students of images to a group, and five images are shown as seen above as a single plate. This makes the walks more transparent and accessible than was possible in the learning management system. The students did not have to "friend" the instructor to join the social learning group - that group type is designed with educators in mind. Uploading to Facebook is also more reliable than uploading to the learning management system. Facebook has some of the best compression routines for uploading images, the learning management system did not seem to have any compression capabilities and uploads fail for students on limited bandwidth.

Fall 2020 no specific app was assigned, which resulted in some students using apps that made documentation of their walking more challenging. This was the first term for this course to go online.

Some of the app choices did not provide maps. Other apps had issues of verifying the date on which the walk occurred.

Although the day of the week is shown above, the date is always "today" because that is when the screenshot was taken. The student was taking screenshots immediately after walking while they were still in the app. The complication is the inability to easily cross-check that a particular day was not a resubmission of a prior day. In general, obtaining an identical distance, pace, and time is unlikely. Especially if a GPS track is shown and is also identical. That would suggest a resubmitting of an earlier weekday shot. With 25 students submitting weekly, tracking a resubmit was not functionally possible. 

During the term 1017 walks were taken by the students. The course began with 25 students. During the first ten weeks eight students would withdraw from the course. Only one withdrawal was student initiated, a student on another island who was feeling overwhelmed by their online workload. Of the remaining seven, only two ever submitted miles. Five students make no submissions of miles or other work. Attempts to reach these students by counselors was unsuccessful. Of the two students who were initially submitting miles, both stopped submitting miles without further explanation. These two also did not respond to requests for further information on what went wrong for the them.

The course concluded with 17 students still actively walking. Students were located on the islands of Pohnpei, Chuuk, and Yap. One student was located in Aurora, Colorado. Of the 17 students who completed the course, on average 15 of the 17 students were walking each week. 

Students most frequently walked five days a week. In the above chart there were 146 five walks in a week for the 17 students across the 16 weeks of the course. Four walks in a week was the second most frequent number of walks in a week. The third most frequent was for a student to not walk at all during a particular week. The reasons were varied but a common theme was that the student became too busy with a family event or a other course work. 

The class included daily short videos that introduced content and concepts in walking. The videos were accessed from the course calendar. Each week centered on a particular topic. Topics included an introduction to walking, basic physical fitness metrics, anatomy of walking, physiology of exercise, factors of fitness, foot types, pain and injuries, hydration and heat, flexibility and yoga, shinrin yoku forest walking, competitive walking, transitions to running, running, and joggling. 

Aggregated reporting of learning against the course student learning outcomes was not possible this term due to a technical failure of unknown cause within the Schoology learning management system. 

This term only the final grade distribution can be reported. Each walk generated four points for a maximum possible 20 points per week from walking. Each week ended with an online quiz on the content for that week. There were ten of these end of a week quizzes due to holidays and weeks with assignments due in lieu of a quiz. The quizzed carried three to twelve points each with an average of 5.3 points. Thus the walking carried a total of 320 points while the quizzes came in at 53 points. At term end there was a total possible of 402 points, thus walking was 80% of the grade in the course. The remaining points were in a few assignments involving students submitting their fitness numbers. 

Plans for the spring center around finding a way to not have to use a platform such as Facebook to report walking. Yet only one app seems to provide an easy ability to view other user's workouts: Strava. And while Strava has yet to fail to track me in the past four years, some of my students have had erratic results with Strava. I suspect that there is a settings issue involved either with location services or energy management services. That said, I continue to plan to use Strava in the spring. This will essentially require a daily check of 25 students to determine who did their walk that day. This should, however, also resolve the issue of students resubmitting prior week walks to cover missed days.