Remote practical teaching: As always, it comes down to the learning outcomes.

I was recently asked, “Did you get any value out of your teacher training? I remember you hating it at the time”, which is both an interesting question and a true statement. As an Engineer I appreciate efficiency in all things and this tends to be the antithesis of the methods typically embraced by those teaching education; for example, activities where you break into small groups and discuss what you think about a subject before reporting back your group's consensus view to the whole class. I find the habitual use of such methods frustrating, especially when, in my mind, the core of what I’m being taught could be succinctly summed up, contextualised with a few examples and be finished. This is why I often have sympathy and veiled appreciation for students attempting to optimise (and by that I mean minimise) the amount of effort required to achieve a decent grade. They are, in essence, true engineers for attempting to engineer the education system to which they have been presented.

The principle value I gained from my PGCert is something that can be succinctly summed up and contextualised with a few examples. Here goes:

Think about what you want your students to learn. 

I started teaching in a very different time to now. I was recruited as a lecturer at a time of a student recruitment boom and universities were desperate for teachers; anyone marginally competent in their field of study that wouldn’t cause a disproportionate amount of physical or reputational damage to the institution was viable. Up until I started my teaching job I had spent three years doing computational simulation research, which involved very little human interaction. Then, with virtually no preparation, I was dumped in front of a lecture theatre full of students and told to get on with it.

I needed to devise modules by building a curriculum and, of course, I chose a path to that outcome modelled on the experience I had been exposed to as an undergraduate; i.e a series of lectures starting from the basics, being built upon until all the content had been delivered. My first modules were designed by stacking and bolting together content from the simplest concepts in week 1, incrementing until the depth of the subject filled the allocated portion of the programme for which I was responsible. Looking back, this was demonstrably the wrong approach. My teaching mirrored the methods of my teachers because either they were taught in that way or they had failed to communicate to me their grander plans, or the learning outcomes, for their students.

Building a curriculum by stacking content from the bottom up is considered anathema in the learning and teaching community yet I still find teachers, even experienced ones, falling into the trap of justifying teaching specific content based on a perceived need rather than the learning outcomes that the content provides.

What has this got to do with remote practical teaching?

The rapid onset of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, brought about spontaneous shifts in the delivery methods for teaching which most of us were not expecting. There has been an impact on all learning and teaching, but for lectures, which have for a long time been the subject of discussion as a candidate for the flipped classroom and are facilitated by mature video streaming/lecture capture tech, the pivot to online delivery is reasonably straightforward. There is, of course, a detriment to student experiences of moving lectures online. For example, there is a tangible difference between viewing a live performance witnessed as a shared event by a community of peers and the remote delivery of the same content to an individual through a screen. However, compared to delivering practical teaching remotely, giving a lecture remotely isn’t exactly rocket science (unless that is the topic, which it sometimes is in engineering).

To deliver practical teaching remotely, such as that which happens in a laboratory, requires significant consideration. Engineering students typically interact with sophisticated physical apparatus that they won’t conceivably have access to at home and perform procedures in carefully controlled environments. For teachers who work in practical engineering education, laboratories and the equipment in them are the tools of our trade. Without access to these, how do we cope? The answer is to go back to basics:

Think about what you want your students to learn. 

As with all tasks that form part of a student’s curriculum, practical activities are a vehicle for achieving learning outcomes. When we consider the best methods to provide an alternative learning experience to our standard practical teaching, we don’t necessarily want to replicate what students would have done in a laboratory setting. Instead we should devise the best activity to achieve the learning outcomes given the new set of options and constraints. For example, if the learning outcome for a laboratory was to process experimental data and quantify the error and uncertainty, it may be possible to supply students with a set of data they can process and analyse rather than have them gather the data themselves. 

When we ask students to perform experiments it is an effective use of time if multiple facets of learning can be simultaneously gathered. In the example above, where students gather data and use this to meet the learning outcome of processing that data, the very act of gathering the data will result in learning: a data capture strategy will need to be devised, familiarisation with the instrumentation will be developed, recording data and observations will be practised...etc. 

A tale of two learning outcomes

To differentiate between learning outcomes that are deliberately chosen as part of curriculum design and a latent and unavoidable part of conducting practical work I use the following terms:

Explicit learning outcomes: Those that are communicated to the students as the focus of the activity, taught, practised by students and finally assessed. 

Implicit learning outcomes: Learning that occurs as a result of performing practical activities, but are not specifically communicated to the student or assessed. Discussions around implicit learning can occur if promoted by students.

Implicit learning outcomes have been touched upon in the literature, but principally from the perspective of how to make them explicit. In a practical context, I feel it best to maintain awareness of their existence in my activities, for mapping and audit purposes, but not diluting the focus of a taught session by communicating these supplementary outcomes to students.

In disrupted times we don’t necessarily have the luxury of meeting all the implicit learning outcomes and our tactics should be to find alternatives that create the best student experience and fulfil the explicit learning outcomes, given the new modes of teaching to which we have access. In my stock data example, the conscious decision has been made to choose a teaching method that eliminates some of the implicit learning outcomes. If these are vital to the programme it should be ensured they are tackled in another activity but, in theory, they should be mentioned as explicit learning outcomes somewhere else.

Identifying the explicit learning outcomes

To date, MEE has been rigorous in the specification of laboratory learning outcomes. For all of our activities the learning outcomes are prominently displayed on the front of all lab sheets. This is not only good practice, which you would expect from a group of dedicated educationalists, but is also valuable when the requirements for a replacement activity need to be identified. This is an example of one of the many elements of MEE’s processes that, I believe, have allowed our practical teaching to react to the pandemic more effectively than other departments. 

Beyond this MEE have also begun the process of categorising these learning outcomes. With some examination of what we have implemented so far, and using our expertise, I believe it would be possible for MEE to collaboratively develop a toolkit for educators to select and apply different tactics for different categories of explicit learning outcomes. 

The suspension of face to face teaching may have been disruptive but disruption to routine can often be beneficial. It is an opportunity to reevaluate that our learning outcomes are correct and fit for purpose; and to ensure the activities we provide, both online and offline, are an effective and efficient use of time for both staff and students.