[MUSIC] When teaching larger class sizes, an online environment, can provide many opportunities for increased student engagement, group work and self testing. In this case study, Professor Alan Crosky from the University of New South Wales, explains how he uses a blended learning approach, in his engineering materials and chemistry course, with 700 first year students. Alan also highlights, the importance of providing student orientation and support when first introducing an online component. And discusses the benefits, of integrating online resources and tutorials, group work, peer assessment, and self testing in the course. >> The course is engineering materials and chemistry. It's a foundation course for first year engineering students. It's a blended learning course, and we teach about 700 students a year in two cohorts. We used to run the labs with a demonstrator giving a mini-lecture beforehand. The initiative was to improve that pre-lab exercise by using computers and then eventually to transfer that online. Once you start using your online environment a lot, you also have to think it out, and you have to introduce the students to the online environment. You can't just put the stuff up there and say, you do it? And really, the more detailed you are online, the less they're going to come back and ask you questions. So, you're actually saving yourself a whole lot of effort. The big point of orientation activity, is intended to get them to walk through the online environment. So, I actually walk through the online environment in class. This particular course has a lot of online material and it's necessary to give the students some sort of guidance as to where they're going to find things. So, we get them to do some of what we call orientation exercises studying in week one. We get them to actually submit something online just to make sure they've got their browser setting right and that's done here. We have [SOUND] help and FAQs. So, this is actually a link to the discussion board and also I said a frequently answered questions with hyperlinked answers. The other thing is there is no point having, a help board if it doesn't get answered. So, so you got to answer it regularly and they have to know how often you are going to answer it. I answer it daily. I say to them not to use email except for personal issues. For general things they post on the discussion board, because lots of other people have the same problem and also, someone might answer it quicker than I do. By doing all that, it does create a community between you and the students. I guess the driver, initially, was to get the tutorials online and we did a review of the course at the same time, and put some more online materials in. So, the first tutorial I do, which is a graded tutorial, is the Tensile Testing tutorial. This is actually what we see, when we do that test. So, that's quite a rich animation. And then they can go back in here, and click on the different paths, and there's a few words about what's happening. I feel this is a very good example of a learning object. We have some self-test questions, the drag and drops. We give them some numerical examples and, the hyperlink solutions like so. The students love the flexibility. They can spend as long as they want in the body of the tutorial so students with English as a second language find it very useful to be able to work through it in their own time. And go through it, as many times as they want. [BLANK_AUDIO] The other thing we have that I'd like to show you is a group project. First of all, we have the project details. This tells them what they're going to do. They put them into groups in week two. Have five people in each group. And, they have to come up with a group contract. This is really to get their group organised. And we provide, group discussion boards in the groups section. And we also provide, a white board so each group, has a group discussion board. And, you can see, there's been 147 postings. We moderate the marks for individuals using an online, peer assessment a system called IPEA. [SOUND] And, they really have difficulty with that, and again, I'll sort of sell it in class by saying, when you leave here and are professional engineers, you're going to have to review other people's work, and this is why we're getting you to do this and also, we think that part of viewing other people's work it makes you more objective, about your, reviewing your own work. And anecodal evidence does indicate that it actually improves their performance. And of course the third thing is, it allows us to provide, more detailed feedback than what we can ourselves. Now lots of people live a long way away, they might just have my class and that's all on that day, they might spend three hours traveling each way to get here. I could understand that they might [LAUGH] go for another option. So, I'm all about flexibility, I think you ought to provide it as flexibly as you can. Of course my course also caters for a lot of different learning styles. We provide a whole lot of things in course resources. There's lecture notes. We also record the lectures, video record them, as well as voice record them. >> If we go away and do that experiment, we find that the materials in the pink zone. >> We also put the lab sheets for the lab, and we also have PDF versions of the assessable tutorials that they can download for intro. Development of online materials is very time consuming and, it's very difficult for academics to do so, we had a dedicated developer there who could assist the people develop the online materials. The online environment does offer some tremendous advantages for creating a community in online learning that you can't create in class, and I think it flows across in to the class. By virtue of the tutorial being online, we only have to timetable one hour blocks for the labs, and that freed up the timetabling immensely and has made our life a whole easier. Online submission, is very useful because you know who submitted, you know, things don't get lost, there's a record of when they're submitted. The other thing is that, the grades have actually improved considerably, we have really brought up the bottom, reduced the failure rate of 50%. The online environment is particularly useful, for large class teaching. Each student, opens his computer and is having a conversation with you through that computer. Like, it allows it to be much more personal. Breaking down these barriers, the us and them barriers yeah you know we're all in this together. You're here to learn, and I'm here to help you, and I'm doing all these things to help you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
