the U.S. Capitol building

U.S. Civics Level-Up

A “level-up” is a short, online course that emphasizes foundational knowledge within a major. Duke began exploring the level-up concept in 2017 as a tool to give students the background needed to be successful in required courses, especially gateway courses and key major courses.

In Spring 2018, Learning Innovation conducted the first pilot of the level-up concept. We worked with two professors from Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy to create a short online course on introductory U.S. civics. Students in two sections of a 300-level public policy course were required to complete the online course at the beginning of the semester.

We found that students reported significant gains in their knowledge on every key concept we asked about on the survey.

Graph showing student knowledge of how a bill becomes a law before and after taking the U.S. civics level-up
Graph showing student knowledge of how a bill becomes a law before and after taking the U.S. civics level-up

We found notable variation in how students used the course materials. About a third of the students skipped some or all of the videos and only took the required quizzes. Just under a third watched the videos and stopped while watching to take notes. The rest watched most of the videos without taking notes.

Bar graph: How did you use the videos?
Chart showing how students used videos in the U.S. civics level up

Because the students were only required to complete the quizzes to receive “credit” for taking the course, the course ended up allowing students to essentially test out of topics they already knew while watching videos at whatever pace they wanted to learn about new topics. In the open-ended questions on our survey, students commented on this flexibility.

Finally, we found that students appreciated when the instructors made reference throughout the course to where in the level-up students could return to refresh their understanding of different topics. Many students felt that completing the entire level-up at the beginning of the semester was rushed, and they did not retain the information that was not subsequently referenced until the end of the semester. They recommended breaking the content into two mini-courses and assigning them at the beginning and mid-point of the course.