I’ll be giving a webinar as part of the fantastic Sligo IT webinar series this Wednesday at lunchtime. You can register and find out more here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1135441135. The webinar will cover some of the work I’ve done on my Teaching Fellowship on the area of pre-lecture resources. It’ll be my first webinar – I’m quite nervous about it, but looking forward to the instant interaction of the audience as I give the talk!
Abstract:
This presentation will outline the use of online pre-lecture resources to supporting in-lecture material. The design rationale is to develop a cyclical approach between online resources and lectures, so that the two are mutually dependent. The aim of the resources are to introduce students to some key ideas and terminology prior to the lecture, so that their working memory during the lecture can focus on application
and integration, rather than familiarising with new terminology. These had a short quiz associated with them which was linked to the gradebook in the VLE. Some design principles behind developing these (and any) e-learning resources will be presented, along with implementation strategy and some analysis of the effect of using these resources with my own students.
Michael – ‘really enjoyed the webinar – great work. I was particularly taken with the way you crunched the numbers and showed that correlation between use of the lecture resources and student results.
I wondered if you had any qualitative feedback from students on how they found that online learning experience? Obviously their grade tells you a lot – but did they have any general comments on this new learning experience?
Hi Mary,
Thanks for the comments. Sorry I just realised afterwards that there were some queries I missed in the text box, one of which was this one, which is an important one to ask.
The roll out of these resources is a larger project than I presented, and another aspect is the evaluation of student experiences of them, a study being conducted by a colleague of mine (I got the easy bit, doing the stats!). So that data when it comes out will answer your question much better than I can now. All I can say is that anecdotally, students generally seemed to accept them as part of their routine and like them. They wanted them to remain online after they were due to be complete, and where I asked them to prepare material for lectures, they appeared to do so with great enthusiasm. It was frustrating for some students who had technical difficulties in the first week or two, but that ironed out after a while. Several students, both who had and had not done chemistry before, said that they appreciated the quiz feedback which helped them get a grip on some concepts and ideas that were going to be presented in the lecture, points reiterated in end of semester feedback. Hopefully we’ll be able to report a more formal analysis of student opinions of using the online resources in the near future!
Thanks again,
Michael
Michael-
We are considering transitioning from a face-to-face prelab format to podcasting. Could you send me rescources you’ve used? Sorry, I just discovered that you podcasted information on this last month.
Estelle