Webcasts promote in-class active participation and learning in an engineering elective course

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the design and outcomes of an educational intervention undertaken to improve the quality of delivery of a fourth-year engineering elective course – Industrial Wastewater and Solid Waste Management at the University of Queensland. The objective was to increase the level of active participation of students in planned active-learning classroom activities, including whole-class discussions and small group project-type work. According to a flipped classroom model, new online material in the form of webcasts was proposed to students before class. Students reacted very positively to the webcasts: the percentage of students viewing the webcast before planned workshop sessions ranged between 80% and 92% over the five weeks of the intervention. Enhanced engagement led also to increased attendance (85–92% at workshop sessions), and remarkable active participation in class (half of observed teams were ∼80% active). Remarkably, team performance as quantified by their report marks linearly correlated with the level of active participation in class.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement
• flipped classroom
• web-based learning

Acknowledgements

This study was accomplished in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education at the University of Queensland. Tuition fees were covered by a grant by the Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic. I thank my teachers Gloria Dall’Alba, Ravinder Sidhu and Thanh Pham for their valuable inputs and suggestions. I also thank the tutor Tim Huelsen for his substantial contribution towards data collection in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stefano Freguia is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland’s Advanced Water Management Centre. He is the course coordinator for the chemical engineering advanced elective course, Wastewater and Solid Waste Management. He also contributes to teaching the first-year engineering course, Engineering Design. His research interests are wastewater treatment and microbial electrochemistry.