with Dr Becky Selwyn, Associate Professor in Engineering Education
BILT
So question number one is: what are you doing in terms of active learning?
Becky Selwyn
For me, active learning is about getting the students to do as many of the things that will help them to learn as possible.
When I was a student, it was expected that you would do the learning at home in your own time and you would spend time going through questions and getting stuck. But I prefer to put that stuff in lectures.
I use a flipped lecture approach, or flipped classroom approach, where all of the content, all of the theoretical content, is delivered through short videos that are available on Blackboard a week before the lecture.
Then when we come to the lecture, they get a very, very brief recap and it’s maybe 5 minutes, 5 to 10 minutes of an hour long lecture. Then we go into questions and we try applying the theory that we’ve learned to questions.
I teach a very large group in first year. I teach a less large, but still large group in third year. Obviously, as the students progress, the types of questions that they’re doing change, because in first year, (the unit is Engineering Science, we do thermodynamics) it’s very much learning the basics of the laws of thermodynamics and what they look like in particular contexts.
So the questions in first year are quite short and multiple choice based questions. I design it so that the incorrect options are things that students commonly get wrong, so that I can address that in the lecture and students can reflect and go, ‘okay, I’ve done this question, I got a different answer to the right answer. She’s just explained to me that this is what went wrong’.
Hopefully by doing that in the lecture, it’s making sure that everybody has that opportunity and everybody is doing it, but also in a supported way so that we can wander around the classroom and answer questions.
In third year, it’s a bit different because the questions are much more open-ended and much longer. There’s a lot more of me and other teaching staff in the room wandering around and seeing where students are up to, what they’re getting stuck on, whether there are common things that we need to address, like common misunderstandings that we tried to address in the asynchronous stuff but didn’t quite work.
But then we can address that partway through a question. So it’s not a multiple choice thing. It’s very open-ended, but we can address the common issues as the students are working through them.
I think that makes it so much more effective because they’re definitely doing these questions, even though they’re scary and hard. They’re doing it in a way where we’re supporting them and scaffolding their approach a bit and directing them so that they get a bit more familiar with what they need to be doing by the time they get to the end of the unit, hopefully.
BILT Brilliant, thank you. You mentioned some of the reasons for choosing this approach and you mentioned that it was different from the way that you’d approached your own studying and learning; is this something that you’ve been developing over the last few years or is this a relatively new thing? What’s been the reason for that shift?
Becky Selwyn
I started right from the start of when I was lecturing. I always had examples in my lectures but I used to deliver the content and then have the examples. Then, pre-pandemic, I got fed up of delivering the content, but also it was going too fast for students to be able to take in the content and then do something with it in the lecture. There wasn’t enough time. Even though we had more hours of lectures pre-pandemic, it was still delivering content and then going, ‘now let’s see what that looks like in an example’, trying to use it immediately. But actually students needed a little bit of processing time, a little bit of time to reflect and go, ‘what does this mean?’ And to kind of go back over notes and think, ‘what is this?’.
So for almost 10 years, I’ve been moving in this direction. It was just before the pandemic, I think, where I went, right, I’m moving this way now. I’m taking all of the derivations, all of the theory, it’s going to go online. Then the pandemic happened and it just naturally caused everything to switch.
It’s a lot easier doing it since the pandemic because a lot more units are doing it. So it’s a lot easier to set the expectation and say, ‘this is how the unit will work: you will watch some videos, then you will turn up to the lecture and we’ll do some questions’. And that’s a lot easier than being the one unit that’s going, ‘by the way, I’m not going to teach you in these lectures’, which students found a bit weird to start with.
BILT And has that had any kind of impact on engagement in lectures or attendance at lectures at all?
Becky Selwyn
Yes, I think students attend in much higher numbers and I think they get much more from attending as well. Students are awake, they’re alert, they’re doing things. Some students are never going to attend and that’s fine, they don’t, that’s okay. But we get higher attendance for these lectures.
It was particularly noticeable when I was one of the outliers doing this approach that attendance would drop off towards Christmas for all of the other units of the same students. I’d be sat there going, ‘there’s still quite a lot of students coming to my lectures…they must be enjoying it’. So that gave me the confidence to keep going. It’s not quite as differentiated now, I think, because more people are taking this approach.
It does keep attendance much higher and it keeps the students engaged, it keeps them alert. I think they enjoy it more as well. The other benefit, which I think is almost an accidental benefit, is because we spend time wandering around, the students get to know us and they feel more familiar and they build that sense of community and belonging and it makes the staff and the teaching assistants feel much more accessible to them, which I think is really important, particularly when we have such massive cohorts of students.
BILT
Brilliant. What if, let’s say a student hasn’t done the work prior to the session with you? Do you still get students attending and just giving it a go?
Becky Selwyn
Yes, we do. I’m quite clear in the first lecture I have with any group of students about the expectations. Basically the first hour is ‘this is how this is going to go. This is what I’m telling you. This is what I would like you to do’. But I am also very clear and I say, ‘look, if you don’t have time, if you don’t do the prep, don’t worry, that happens. It happens to everybody. We all turn up to things without having read the questions or done the preparation. Still come because you’ll still get a benefit from being in the room. You’ll get a benefit from seeing what your peers are trying to do and what approaches they’re taking. And I’m still going to go through the solution for you. So you’re still going to see that brief recap at the start. And you’re still going to see how to work through that solution, which is going to then make it easier for you when you go home and try and catch up on this rather than trying to catch up on it completely unsupported’.
I do have students all of the time who turn up and you get to them and say, ‘how can I help?’ And they go, ‘I’ll be honest, I didn’t do the prep, but I’m here’. And it’s like, ‘great, you’re here. Have a quiet few minutes. We’ll go through the solution in a minute. Don’t worry about it.’
BILT
Excellent, that’s brilliant. So this next question is how do you think this approach could be applicable to other disciplines?
Becky Selwyn
In my context, I guess, because it’s engineering, there’s quite a lot of equations, there’s quite a lot of applying equations, figuring out what the simplifications are, working out the assumptions. I think any STEM subject probably has quantitative things where they can use this approach really easily.
If you can phrase a question, then you can have students trying to solve that question. If it’s a numerical thing, you can have multiple choice answers. If it’s a more discussion based thing, then you can still have time where students do some prep and they do some thinking about it and then come to the session and have some discussions and maybe you can have voting on like who agrees with which statement the most following this discussion. I don’t do discussion-based things, so I don’t know what that would look like. But I don’t see any reason why students wouldn’t still be learning in this way, because learning happens the same way regardless of what you’re learning. So I think you could use this in any topic.
BILT If there was a member of staff looking to try out some active learning, what would be a first activity? Maybe they haven’t got a whole unit design or programme sorted, but what would be a starting point?
Becky Selwyn
I think there’s a whole range of things you can do. I think the easiest thing is probably to put a poll or a Mentimeter in there and go, we’ve done the theory, we’ve done the equations, what do you think the answer is? Try this question and make it a short question and see how they get on. Because that, you know, you could always do it halfway through a lecture and go, here’s a 5 minute break for you to try and do something before I start talking again.
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