This chapter discusses how 11th and 12th grade high school students taking college classes for credit, called dual enrollment students, are empowered and actively engaged when evolving mobile technologies such as socrative.com and remind.com are used in the college classroom. Classroom Response Systems, Peer Instruction, and the Flipped Classroom have all become widely known and growing instructional strategies used to promote active learning and enhance student engagement in the college classroom. Socrative.com is used as a Classroom Response System to provide students voice in the learning context. Peer instruction facilitated through the use of socrative.com allows for the engagement of learners and is shown to empower students in the classroom to engage in and control their own learning. Effective communication outside of class is necessary in a flipped classroom. Remind.com is used outside the classroom to enhance communication and to keep students on track with announcements and reminders.
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In this chapter, strategies based on mobile learning principles used to teach dual enrollment students at an open access university in the South are discussed. These instructional strategies include mobile device-supported classroom response and communication systems embedded in instructional approaches promoting use of targeted informal assessments paired with student-centered instructional approaches, specifically peer instruction and the flipped classroom.
Georgia's Move on When Ready (MOWR)/Dual Enrollment program provides eligible high school students with the opportunity to take college courses to satisfy their high school graduation or home study completion requirements while earning college credit. The primary goal of MOWR is to positively influence postsecondary success and college degree completion rates in different populations, including those populations that represent diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, particularly those at risk of not attending college.
Data from the U.S. Department of Education (2016) indicate that the accumulation of twenty college credits by the end of the first calendar year of college is a strong predictor that a student will successfully earn a college credential (Adelman, 1999, 2006). Attaining a minimum of twenty credit hours prior to formally starting college is a strong indicator that the student is college ready and sets them up for continued success in their academic pursuits. Studies also have shown that students who participated in concurrent credit experiences enrolled in colleges and universities at rates significantly higher than students who did not participate (Florida Department of Education, 2004).
Over 77 percent of public four-year institutions in the U.S. have high school students taking college courses for concurrent or stand-alone credit (Kleiner and Lewis, 2005). Opportunities to earn college credit while in high school provide a large number of high school students with exposure to the college experience and access to college-level content (Hoffman, Vargas, & Santos, 2009). Programs supporting high school students in pursuing college credit, such as MOWR, are expected to provide students with substantial academic support through these course requirements; in turn, taxpayers will receive a return on this investment since more young people will enter the labor market with high credentials prepared to contribute to the state’s economy and pay taxes (Hoffman, et al., 2009).
In Georgia’s MOWR program, students must qualify for dual enrollment by meeting established criteria. Students must be in high school entering the junior or senior year and have a grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 or higher in courses taken from the required College Preparatory Curriculum unit (i.e., core academic courses such as English, Math, Science, Social Science courses; excluding electives). Other admission/eligibility criteria include a minimum of 480 verbal and 460 math scores on the SAT-1 and a combined SAT score of 970 or a minimum of 21 English and 19 mathematics score on the ACT with a minimum composite score of 20. Course credits earned count for both college and high school either as an academic course or an elective depending on the course taken. Dual-enrollment students are exempted from paying tuition to the post-secondary institution, and the state subsidizes the purchase of textbooks and other instructional materials (Hoffman et al., 2009).
Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) with a population of over 12,000 students, has close to 400 dual enrollment students currently enrolled. To obtain credit for courses taken at GGC, students must achieve a “D” grade or higher. Introduction to Economics (ECON2100) is a course taught on the GGC campus that satisfies the dual enrollment high school graduation requirement. ECON2100 is a 3-credit hour course with no math prerequisites. This makes it a popular course for dual enrollment students to take. In some sections of ECON2100, dual enrollment students could make up more than one-half of the class size.