UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Awarded to: Alan Chambers
Institution: University of Southampton
Funded in: 2003
Project description: The project produces a web-based tutorial strategy for satisfying the educational needs of large groups of students at minimum cost in terms of the support supplied by the academic staff.
Background: The heavy resource demands of providing adequate tutorial support for undergraduate learning is an issue for all academic departments. The project team proposes to investigate, develop and evaluate a technology-based approach which builds on existing good practice in the HE sector. This activity will form a focus for a community of academics with interest and expertise in these activities established through the project's consultation and dissemination activities.
'Materials' is a mandatory module for first and second year students within the School of Engineering Sciences at the University of Southampton. The annual cohort of over 200 students are lectured as one group in both years. In the first year the lecture course is supported by 1 laboratory class, 2 computer based learning classes and 5 academic style tutorials. As these classes are conducted as small groups (6-20 students), the demand on academic staff time is very high (13 hours/week).
In the second year the lecture course is supported by 2 laboratory classes. It is not possible to provide the academic support for time-tabled tutorials as offered in the first year. It was with the demands on academic time in providing tutorial support in mind that we provided a case study for the FDTL3 'Tutoring Materials Project'. Our case study was the 'Effective use of post-graduates in providing tutorial support'. The objectives were to establish how post-graduates could be positively used in the teaching process both to the benefit of the students, the academic staff and the careers of the post-graduates. In summary, the conclusions were that post-graduates could not be realistically expected to replace academics in face-to-face traditional tutorials but have a very positive role to play in laboratory/CBL classes providing proper training was given. A training programme for postgraduates was an outcome of this case study.
This project was very valuable and has resulted in clear improvements in our approach to tutorials which has been transmitted to the wider community by our participation in FDTL project meetings. As a result we have identified the parameters within which we can expect the use of post-graduates to be effective. This understanding has lead us to this proposal which is concerned with providing support and feedback to students on modules which cannot be supported by 'face to face tuition'. In our case this is the 'large group' second year materials module.
The main deliverable is hoped to be a tutorial strategy for providing support for a large student cohort which is educationally beneficial and cost effective from a resource standpoint.
The project will also provide a set of materials tests and questions for the LTSN resource bank.
