As more college courses transition to hybrid and fully online models due to Covid-19, the classroom environment for higher education has changed and will continue to do so (Bonk, 2020). As online learning continues to grow, a challenge of not connecting with the instructor can be a concern. Success in the online classroom is possible for students who may feel they are alone in online learning (Holbeck & Hartman, 2018). With the right combination of engagement tools, student interaction with the curriculum, class, and professor result in a meaningful learning experience (Holbeck & Hartman, 2018). The history of online education, the challenges of teaching and learning in an online course as it relates to pass rates, and the tools used for engagement in online learning that result in success in an online math course will be discussed. The primary goal of this study is to compare the success rates of students that are taking online math courses in which professors use engagement tools with those that are in courses where engagement tools are not used. Another goal of the study is to track the amount of time that students spend in the course when engagement tools are used as opposed to when engagement tools are not used.

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The purpose of this dissertation in practice is to address the problem of online credit recovery. Although online enrollments have skyrocketed in recent years and all preliminary research indicates a large percentage of those enrollments are from students seeking credit recovery, much of the curriculum currently being offered is not research-based. Following a literature review focused on the history of credit recovery as well as successful current methods, we designed CRIT (Credit Recovery Instructional Treatment), a research-based approach to curriculum design for credit recovery. CRIT is a standards based curriculum relying on criterion based assessments. This approach was then applied in the creation of specific curriculum for English 4 credit recovery and as a general approach for all subjects. A step by step evaluation plan for current and proposed approaches for credit recovery was then defined. Additionally, we provide a detailed implementation strategy specific to our organization but easily retrofitted for other organizations. We focus on the organization of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a state run K-12 virtual school run as a special school district in Florida because it is a familiar organization; however, the model and results may be generalizable for online or traditional education.

This dissertation focuses on the role that College Composition courses can and should play in addressing the digital divide and the literacy divide. For this project, digital divide refers to the space between those students who have opportunity to participate in online discourse communities and to contribute to the collective intelligence described by Henry Jenkins and those who have not had this opportunity even though they do have access to current technology. The literacy divide discussed is created when literacy is defined simply as the ability to read and write. Students need to be visually, digitally, and technologically literate. In response to these gaps, I propose reimagining the first-year writing course as a course in storytelling across disciplines and media. Story, oral storytelling, digital narrative, and transmedia narrative are explained. An analysis of several stories including a canonical comic book, a commercial, and a long-term narrative television show are analyzed using Aristotle, Propp, Saussure, Jenkins, Birkerts, and other theorists important to work in Texts and Technology. The guiding question for this project is How can a focus on storytelling using new and digital media in the first-year English composition course create an authentic and relevant learning experience for contemporary students while bridging the digital divide created by the lack of opportunity to participate in the collective intelligence of the convergence culture? Finally, the dissertation includes a research protocol which describes and justifies future research to test the claims made in this dissertation.