Case Study: City College of San Francisco

City College of San Francisco

This case study is a subset of a larger-scale efficacy report commissioned by Wiley that included use of WileyPLUS with ORION at U.S. colleges and universities which were among the early adopters of ORION. A separate report is available that aggregates findings from these case studies into an overall assessment of efficacy across participating sites in the Spring 2014 term.

Professor Susan Berston teaches Introduction to Business at the City College of San Francisco, along with other upper-level business courses. In the Spring 2014 semester, she incorporated ORION as a graded component of her GNBS 119: Introduction to Business course. Across the course’s three sections, 90 students initially enrolled, but only 62 completed the course.

Using WileyPLUS with ORION

Professor Berston required her students to use ORION as part of their grade. Students had the opportunity to engage with up to 17 chapters of content. The typical student engaged with ORION for 9.5 chapters and engaged with ORION for three hours. The average proficiency score across all assessments is 51%. While 85% of those who completed the course engaged with ORION, only 39% of those who withdrew engaged with ORION at all throughout the semester.

WileyPLUS

Students showed a wide range of results in their performance in WileyPLUS homework. A substantial portion of the students did not earn a passing grade on the homework assignments, which should have served as an early alert for these students. On the other hand, almost one-quarter earned an A on the homework, and an equal percentage of students earned a B.

Results

The students’ grades showed a great range of performance as the same number earned an A as an F, with an overall average of 2.03 (on a 0.00-4.00 scale). The instructor indicated that this variation is often the case at her community college, but students who engaged with both WileyPLUS and ORION showed much better performance. The students’ performance in WileyPLUS is clearly associated with the students’ overall grade. Those who earned 91+ in WileyPLUS earned an A, while those who performed in the middle range were likely to get a C. The amount of engagement students have with ORION is closely related to their grade. Students who did not engage at all are almost certain to fail, while those who engaged with fewer than half of the exercises earned a C/D. Those who engaged with most/all of the exercises earned a B.