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