Conference Agenda

This paper describes efforts and practices used in teaching a Communication skills course with two full time teachers to approximately 650 enrolled students. It is focused on issues including motivating students if they consider this course to be non-essential for their professional development and a nuisance in their study, achieving learning outcomes in an efficient way, and using of ICT for assessment and self-assessment of communication skills. The ways and means of leveraging ICT in achieving these goals are presented in the paper. The potential of ICT and multimedia to motivate, keep students on schedule, gain their attention in lectures and assess their knowledge is discussed, and lessons learned from six generations of students and how they influenced course re-design are elaborated.

Engineers are required to communicate in a range of formats, including written reports, but this skill does not come naturally to undergraduates. Typical approaches to teaching writing skills require small class sizes, expert staff, and multiple cycles of feedback. These approaches, while successful, are difficult to scale and do not always result in students being able to transfer their writing skills to other units/topics.

The School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol teaches writing skills mainly within a single 20-credit first-year unit, delivered to 550-650 students per year. Students are required to complete a number of at-home labs and write up various sections of a lab report for a series of four formative assessments. A peer review process follows each formative task to encourage engagement with the assessment criteria, encourage reflection and self-regulation, and provide prompt feedback on work.

The benefits of peer review and feedback are well known and are carefully explained to students. However, each year, a relatively small but vocal number of students are reluctant to engage with it and express a strong preference for staff feedback. This project evaluated student perceptions and experiences of the peer review process using a survey and focus groups. Results suggest that although students recognise many benefits of peer reviews, they lack confidence in their ability to provide it, leading to apparent reluctance to engage. This highlights the importance of providing support and training as part of the process.

There have been numerous research studies and recommendations as to what feedback should look like to improve student learning and the learning experience. These recommendations include being timely, fed forward, provided using different modes and sources and to support students to know how to best use the feedback they are given.

The Faculty of Engineering and IT (FEIT) at The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is currently focusing on improving the quality, effectiveness and delivery of feedback provided to their students on their learning and demonstrated achievement in a variety of settings.

This paper reports the first stage of this project where students were asked about their previous experience of receiving feedback, how they are able to use it and their preference as to the type and timing of the feedback they prefer.

Students reported feedback was often was non-existent, extremely limited, non-specific, or too late to be useful. They found feedback was most useful when it was specific, could be used for improvement and was not just focused on correction.

In the current age, digital advancements have shaped the educational landscape by providing numerous possibilities for a fast and on-demand influx of information for students. This brings an additional difficulty for course designers in how to incorporate such technologies in teaching in an optimal way. Key examples are educational videos, which are especially relevant now due to the increase in accessibility of pre-made videos and recording technology since the pandemic. This puts post-pandemic teaching in the new but revolutionary position to complement in-person teaching with videos.

In this study, we examine the effect of videos combined with in-person teaching in a mathematics master course in motivation and grades. This experiment is specifically insightful due to our course consisting of three different topics (A,B,C). In Year 1 (control group), the course was taught traditionally. In Year 2 (experimental group), we provided additional video lectures on (A), while keeping (B) and (C) as before. We compare assessment and survey results between and within years.

Videos did not increase the students’ motivation for the topic (Fisher exact test = 0.06182). The intervention did not improve the midterm or final exam grades on (A) between years. Students who watched videos did not score significantly better on their assignments (2MWUt = 0.275) nor on their exams (2MWUt = 0.745) than students who did not watch the videos. However, a positive effect size was observed between years, while the intervention led to a negative effect size within the same year.