we would like to show our respects and acknowledge the ... · an acknowledgement we would like to...
TRANSCRIPT
An acknowledgement
We would like to show our respects and Acknowledge
the Bedegal people who are the Traditional Custodians
of the Land, of Elders past and present on which this
Alumni Network takes place.
The FULT Alumni Network aims to provide
alumni with an opportunity to:
• Participate in an active network,
• Explore the latest issues is higher education learning and teaching;
• Hear dynamic speakers on educational excellence;
• Be updated on innovations and future directions;
• Support alumni leadership potential as champions of learning and
teaching.
Today’s Alumni Network features
1. A welcome by the PVCE
2. Keynote presentation by a FULT Alumna
3. Presentations by the 2018 recipients of the FULT Alumni Scholarship
4. Lunch
5. Focus group discussion around the impact of the FULT Program
Welcome to the FULT Alumni Network
Professor Alex Steel
Acting PVC(Education)
Keynote Applying learnings from FULT to the classroom
Dr Inmaculada Tomeo-Reyes
BE, MEng, PhD, MIEEE, FHEA
Lecturer, School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications
Laboratory and Casual Staff Coordinator
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC
Dr Inmaculada Tomeo-Reyes
School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications
Applying FULT learnings into my
teaching practice FULT Alumni Network meeting
How did FULT help me?
Background
ELEC1111 is an introduction to electrical engineering for both electrical and
telecommunications engineering students and other engineering disciplines.
It is a first year course
• Pre-requisite for many courses both in electrical and other engineering schools
• More than 1000 students annually (~450 students in T1 and ~650 students in T3)
Before FULT…
• Delivery
– Lectures: 3 hrs/week (450-650 students per room)
– Tutorials: 1 hr/week face-to-face (120 students per room) + weekly online tutorials
– Labs: 2 hrs/week (60 students per room)
• Assessment
– Mid-term exam (individual)
– Laboratory Assessment (pairs) and exam (individual)
– Online quizzes (individual)
– Final exam (individual)
Student learning - 3P model
About Me
Background
• Lecturer (Education focused), UNSW, Australia (2018 – ).
• Associate Lecturer, QUT, Australia (2015 – 2018).
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, QUT, Australia (2015).
• R&D engineer, UC3M, Spain (2008 – 2011).
• Bachelor (2006) and Master (2008) of
Telecommunications Engineering, and Master in
Multimedia and Communications (2010), UC3M, Spain.
Main Research Interests
• Signal and Image Processing.
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
• Engineering Education.
About You
Teaching for learning – Good teaching
• Share their love of the subject.
• Encourage communication between learners and teachers and learn
from each other.
• Encourage interaction and collaboration among learners.
• Provide opportunities for active learning.
• Allow for student independence.
• Provide timely and appropriate feedback.
• Emphasise time on task.
• Motivate learning by communicating expectations and setting clear
goals.
• Respect and accommodate student diversity, talents, and ways of
learning.
Engagement with academic staff
“Students who find academic staff available and helpful are more
engaged with their studies than those who do not. […] About 30 per
cent of students do not seek advice from academic staff. Importantly,
this group of students was most likely to report low achievement
levels in the first semester of their studies. This could have
implications for student retention.”(The First Year Experience in Australian Universities: Findings from Two Decades, 1994 – 2014; Baik, Naylor & Arkoudis)
Approachability
• Encourage face-to-face consultation
• Set up a course discussion board (e.g. Moodle forum)
– Suggest students to use it for questions about course requirements or
assignments, rather than sending emails.
– Encourage students to answer questions, but check regularly.
• Be consistent when answering questions in forums/emails
– Set expectations for response time.
– Dedicate specific hours to responding to forums/email.
– If possible, use appropriate tools to reduce time spent on emails and/or prevent
emails coming back and forth.
• Create effective message content
– Encourage communication.
– Acknowledge the student’s issues.
– Respond in a professional tone.
Approachability
Make students feel that you care about them
as learners and also as persons.
• Frequently encourage your students to contact you if they
have any doubt or problem
– Include “Course convenors” and “Course contacts” blocks in the
Moodle page
– Make it easy for them to contact you by providing different options
• Monitor student progress and follow up
– Address student’s issues with compassion and empathy
Challenge/Opportunity
However, in ELEC1111 tutorials:
• Focus was on the content, not the doing
• Learning occurred in isolation
• There was a lack of authentic problems
• Tutor was a formal authority, and while
most of the students learned the
content, several had important gaps in
their knowledge
According to the literature, learning is
a process that:
• Is active
• Occurs in a complex social environment
• Is situated in an authentic context
• Requires learners’ motivation and
cognitive engagement
ELEC1111 tutorials were redesigned in such a way that:
(a) Students had opportunities to direct the learning process and engage with it
(b) Students had opportunities to collaboratively solve real wold problems which
simulate what is asked of and done by professionals.
(c) Tutors became facilitators rather than formal authorities
Solution
Tutorials in T1’2019:
• Face-to-face collaborative tutorials (2 hrs/week)
These new tutorials offer students authentic learning
experiences by using real world problems which have
to be solved in groups. Students in each group should
work together, supported by tutors, to come up with and
verify solutions.
• Online tutorials (released weekly, to complete at
students’ own pace)
• Tutorial problems for practice (released weekly,
to complete at students’ own pace)
Student-centred and collaborative component
• Creating appropriate environments where students can learn from their peers
allows them to take an active role in their learning and has a positive impact.
• Active and collaborative learning approaches are necessary to develop essential
skills of engineers, who normally work in teams to tackle real world challenges.
Before:
• 120 students in a lecture-like room
• Tutor solves the problems (no
interaction between students)
After:
• 60 students in a collaborative
learning space
• Students solve the problem in
groups with the support of the tutor
Authentic context
• Authentic activities contribute to students' work-readiness capabilities and
employability, so the new tutorials are based on real wold problems and simulate
what is asked of and done by professionals.
Before: After:
• Open-ended problems also play an important role in offering students authentic
learning experiences. Some (simplified) design problems were used in the new
tutorials.
Before
After
Authentic context
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Tutors as facilitators and peer mentors
• The secret of great facilitation is to help creating a group process that flows
and an environment in which it can flourish, so that groups reach a successful
solution.
• Peer mentors can be really useful in this scenario
– Peer mentoring does not usually involve significant differences in age, experience or
rank, which facilitates increased levels of mutual expertise, equality and empathy.
Before:
• 1 tutor for 120 students
• Tutor solves the problems
• Tutor is formal authority
After:
• 1 tutor and 1 mentor for 60 students
• Students solve the problem in groups
with the support of the tutor
• Tutor and mentor are facilitators
• After around 3 weeks, students got used to the learning style and their teams
and started enjoying the method over traditional tutorials. This resulted in an
increased in-class engagement.
– From ~25% attendance in Sem2’18 to ~50% in T1’2019
• Students performed better in contextualised questions in exams:
– Increase of the average mark of contextualised questions on the same topic
with similar difficulty:
▪ Capacitors (mid-term): from 6.7/15 in Sem2’2018 to 9.1/15 in T1’2019
▪ OpAmps (final): from 11.1/15 in Sem2’2018 to 13.4/15 in T1’2019
▪ Phasors (final): from 10.7/15 in Sem2’2018 to 11.3/15 in T1’2019
Results
• Feedback from myExperience indicates that students found problems interesting
and helpful in reinforcing the understanding of the course. They also appreciate
the collaborative component.
Results
“ The new style of face–to–face
tutorials were well done,
especially with the focus on
practical, scenario based
questions which would otherwise
not be covered in the lectures or
textbook”
“The Tutorials I found were rather
helpful, and interesting as they were
more grounded in reality, and required
more problem solving skills”
“I love the interactive tutorials. Being in a
group and talking with each other face to
face was a great way to relive my nerves,
especially as a first year. I find it very
enjoyable to come to the tutorials. The
content in the tutorials was very useful, I like
the practical questions”
“The tutorials were hands down the best
addition to the course. They solidified
our understanding of the topics in a
whole new way, that would help us
actually apply these topics in our
engg1000 and other pursuits”
• Feedback from myExperience also indicates that (as always) there is room for
improvement.
Results
“The face–to–face tutorials were a little
inconsistent in length and difficulty.
This never caused me any concern, but it
may be worth rectifying. Additionally, I
found that, if I required help during these
tutorials, it was sometimes necessary to
wait for rather a long time owing to the
number of students in the room. If
possible, smaller tutorial sizes would be
of great benefit.”
“And maybe include more
engaging group activities in
the tutorials instead of just
'discussing' with members”
“I would like tutorial worked
solutions to be posted since the
tuts are large classes and my tut
was at Friday 9am and I'm
definitely not a morning person so
sometimes I go through the tut
confused and don't ask questions
because I'm not in a mental state
to process information”“These tutorial questions could be improved by
beginning with purely theoretical exercises […]
and then move on to scenario based questions.
This would have allowed for me to get the
basic technique down before moving to more
difficult questions”
Feedback
Apart from the feedback provided in laboratories and tutorials, what
could work well in a class with 600+ students?
• Generic feedback– Summary of class strengths and weaknesses after grading
– Use of polling tools (e.g. Zeetings, Mentimeter, Lecture Recordings+, …) in lectures
– Posts to class discussion forum
• Automated feedback– Automated feedback through
online quiz tools
Feedback
What about individual feedback such as comments on assignments?
• Exam digitisation
– Add marks
– Embed comments throughout the assignment by writing directly into comment boxes
– Reuse commonly used comments from a comments library
– Provide general comments and audio comments
Reflection- Brookfield’s four lenses
Lens 1: The autobiographical lens
‒ Record teaching and learning experiences
‒ Create a teaching portfolio to record your teaching philosophy, goals, aids, recordings,
reflections, feedback, and evaluations
Lens 2: The lens of our students' eyes
‒ Undertake a group discussion during a tutorial session about the teaching/course
‒ Provide students with an evaluation questionnaire
Lens 3: The lens of our colleagues' experiences
‒ Have a critical conversation with an experienced lecturer who works in the same
faculty to help you check, reframe, and broaden your teaching practice
‒ Undertake peer observation
Lens 4: The theoretical lens (based on educational literature)
‒ Engage with articles from the literature of teaching and learning.
‒ Document your engagement with and reflection on the literature of higher education.
Evaluation - Brookfield’s four lenses
Thank you!
2018 FULT scholarship winners
Dr Lisa Anne Williams
Faculty of Science
Awe in Science Learning
Dr Christine Mathies
UNSW Business School
The Power of Student Feedback
Commendation Award
Dr Jessica Macer-Wright
Rural Clinical School
Keeping the Rural in Rural Medicine
https://www.business.unsw.edu.au/our-people/christinemathies
https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-lisa-anne-williams
FULT Alumni Network
Next network meeting
Term 1 2020
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY
Lunch and networking
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-ND
The Impact of FULT?
Dr Anna Rowe
Kristin Turnball
Sonal Bhalla