At recent meetings and conferences and during online discussions I have heard it argued (yet again) that the provision of notes, PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and videos of lecture content will reduce student attendance at timetabled sessions and will perhaps as a result reduce levels of student engagement with learning. This is not a view that I have ever subscribed to personally, and it does seem to fly in the face of the current increase in the popularity of the flipped lecture (another topic actively discussed at the same meetings and in the same online discussions). I have always believed that students will attend lectures if we teach them well and if the lecture is more than a monologue that simply repeats the reading that they have already done.
This issue of Bioscience Education brings together a body of work in which the authors reflect upon their own efforts to engage their students in the learning process. In doing so I feel they have each in different ways made the point that engaged teaching will foster engaged learning.
Given the ongoing concern that provision of lecture material outside of the lecture session may result in a lack of student engagement it is particularly encouraging that Katie Smith and Neil Morris suggest that their students perceived their use of the podcasts to be an important additional learning resource. Their students reported that they concentrated more in lectures when they knew a podcast would be available because there was less pressure to make detailed notes, i.e. they were more engaged. The paper also presents an interesting overview of the diversity of ways students access and engage with podcasts (e.g. whilst revising, during the completion of coursework, to reinforce understanding and to complement the reading of textbooks). A positive response to audio files on the part of the students who use them has also been reported by Susanne Voelkel and Luciane Mello in their comparison of written and audio feedback on coursework and by Alan Cann in his insightful discussion of the process of providing audio feedback from the perspective of both students and staff. Although Susanne and Luciane did not find that the provision of one or other form of feedback influenced academic achievement per se they do argue that audio feedback was more positively received by students and as a result is a means by which the student experience might be enhanced.
Linking engagement to success (academic success and retention/progression) Rosanna Robinson and James McDonald have contributed two papers to this issue of the journal describing and evaluating modules that have been specifically designed to engage students in an active learning process. In the first of these they have identified the transition into higher education as being a particularly important moment in the student journey and one that can perhaps be seen as a tipping point at which failure to engage might result in feelings of isolation, de-motivation and ultimately withdrawal from formal study. As an antidote they describe and evaluate a tutorial based programme of active interventions for first year students that served to enhance interaction between students and their peers and between students and their tutors. The introduction of this module has been positively associated with an increased level of academic attainment and positive feedback from students. Recognising the need to continue to engage students throughout their learning journey James and Rosanna also present a paper describing a module taken by second year students that uses small group based learning, frequent low stakes assessments, peer evaluation and rapid feedback to develop essential skills for learning in the context of developing the skills required of graduate scientists. This module builds upon prior learning and feeds forward as a bridge into the learning that will take place during the students third and final year of study.
Two of the features I particularly like about the work described by Rosanna and James is their use of small groups within a bigger cohort and their use of peer evaluation. I have thought for a long time that one of the real issues facing us as practicing teachers in higher education is the fact that we find ourselves supporting larger and larger classes. Many of the innovations in practice disseminated through Bioscience Education and similar journals are initially trialled at a small scale and one of the criticisms levelled against them is often that they may not (or in fact will not) scale-up. In her paper on the use of feed-forward by students Lesley Morrell has shown that it is possible to reduce the volume of feedback provided to students while still increasing student use of that feedback in a way that ultimately leads to higher levels of academic achievement. She does this by requiring students to benchmark their own work against that of their peers, to generate their own feed-forward on the basis of that benchmarking, and to use this self-generated criticism constructively to improve their own subsequent work. I found the fact that Lesley enables her students to select their best work for assessment rather than to have all of their work assessed particularly interesting because it seems evident to me that by allowing students responsibility for, and ownership of, their assessment in this way is very likely to increase their level of engagement with their learning.