UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
This project developed from an earlier FDTL project which identified the lack of tutorial sessions for large groups of students. This was particularly the case for Materials at the University of Southampton, as it was the only core module for a class of more than 200 Year 2 students. It was thus labour intensive and time-consuming for academic staff to organise tutorial sessions. Postgraduate students had been traditionally used as lab demonstrators and also had some previous exposure in tutorial sessions. This project aimed to provide a scope for a PG student to act as tutor for a group of students, making effective use of the academic’s time. Based on the feedback received from the FDTL project, it was decided to use PG resources in a more remote context. Using a web based communication interface, the PGs would answer individual student questions with a time lag. While the PI would be in charge of the general web-based tutorial, the PGs would be responsible for answering any specialist questions that would be posted by the students. The organisation and monitoring of the scheme was done by four year 4 students (from Mechanical Engineering, Aero and Ship Science) as part of a multidisciplinary project.
The online tutorial sessions were supplemented by MCQs and random question sets to give the students enough scope for practice. Access statistics revealed that the use of these web-based tests peaked during exam time, indicating their use as a revision resource. It was also observed that these tests were used more by those students who already performed well, and by international students rather than the general body.
Specific project deliverables were produced (i.e. web tests and online tutorials). However, from an overall perspective, this project on using PG resources for web-based tutorial sessions could not be sustained. There were a number of reasons for this.
The most immediate factor was the inadequacy of available technology. For those students connecting from outside the university network by means of a dial-up connection, there were very often losses in connectivity.
In principle, the online tutorials were aimed to reduce pressures on staff time, but in actuality, there was no effective control on timing and it proved to be more onerous to cope with multiple questions in real time without any face-to-face contact with tutees.
There was also the problem of remuneration for the post-grad tutors. While it is fairly straightforward to arrange payment for lab demonstrators, in this case it meant that while the tutors would be paid for contact hours with their tutees, there was no provision for the time and effort that they might have put in for preparing these sessions. In case of specialist tutors for answering subject based questions online, it was difficult to estimate the amount of work that the tutor had done, as there was no guarantee that the tutor would need to answer any questions at all during a particular session.
