Sometimes there is a tendency to conflate students participating in applying a skill with teaching how to apply that skill. Take for example, time management. Learning this skill is, as we have all discovered recently, critically important for students to learn for their future career. But do we actually teach students to manage their time? I don’t think I was ever formally taught time management during my masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, but that feels a significantly long time ago now so maybe things have changed. Since finishing my degree and starting teaching, I’ve witnessed demanding workload and concurrent assessment deadlines for current Engineering students being partially justified as an opportunity to exercise their time management skills. Learning through doing and reflecting on your experience is certainly valid - this is absolutely how I’ve learned time management, but I don’t think it can be argued that it is the same as teaching. And I’m fairly sure this approach of learning through doing rather than explicitly teaching is routinely used to develop other transferable skills, such as team work or delivering a presentation, in our Engineering students.
My actual 1st year undergraduate lab book, circa 1998, including "rich" feedback in red correcting the lack of title and date, and two ticks, which I guess meant "good".
When it comes to practical skills, I wonder how much is typically taught and how much is expected to be learned through application. Thinking back again to my undergraduate degree, it was the former method that was adopted by the educators to teach me the skill of keeping an experimental record. While conducting an experiment, I would note down information that I considered relevant and, at the end of the session, a member of staff (probably a teaching assistant) would go through my work and tell me all the things I’d done wrong. This was repeated across multiple experiments, and gradually I’d build up an idea of what was required for the assessor to grade my work with a high mark. I’m fairly sure that a similar approach was applied to many of the practical skills I learned, from fabrication to writing a lab report.
I’d like to believe that the consistently applied blended learning “teaching sandwich” used by MEE to deliver our practical sessions, which mandates students prepare for lab classes before arriving and reflects on their work after leaving, represents a more professional approach to teaching practical skills. First a skill is taught before a session, then it is applied during a session, and finally the application can be considered for how to improve next time after the lab has ended.
One of the difficulties with this approach is gaining access to students to deliver the preparatory teaching, given a finite amount of time academic staff have for contact with students. Really we want to be on hand to contextualize the learning and support students during the application of the practical skills. I’m a big fan of using technology to efficiently deliver didactic teaching though building reusable resources that can be, more or less, automatically delivered. This is one of the reasons why a team of us in MEE developed a MOOC for writing technical engineering reports. After repeatedly delivering dreary lectures, consisting of little more than a tedious list of “rules” to follow when writing up lab results into a report, I thought there must be a better way to do things. Using technology not only provides the space to deep dive into certain aspects of report writing that wouldn’t be feasible during a lecture, it also allows us to align assessment tasks with the online delivery so students can be taught as part of the perpetration for the task. And frees up resources to support and provide richer feedback.
I’d like to believe that the consistently applied blended learning “teaching sandwich” used by MEE to deliver our practical sessions, which mandates students prepare for lab classes before arriving and reflects on their work after leaving, represents a more professional approach to teaching practical skills. First a skill is taught before a session, then it is applied during a session, and finally the application can be considered for how to improve next time after the lab has ended.
One of the difficulties with this approach is gaining access to students to deliver the preparatory teaching, given a finite amount of time academic staff have for contact with students. Really we want to be on hand to contextualize the learning and support students during the application of the practical skills. I’m a big fan of using technology to efficiently deliver didactic teaching though building reusable resources that can be, more or less, automatically delivered. This is one of the reasons why a team of us in MEE developed a MOOC for writing technical engineering reports. After repeatedly delivering dreary lectures, consisting of little more than a tedious list of “rules” to follow when writing up lab results into a report, I thought there must be a better way to do things. Using technology not only provides the space to deep dive into certain aspects of report writing that wouldn’t be feasible during a lecture, it also allows us to align assessment tasks with the online delivery so students can be taught as part of the perpetration for the task. And frees up resources to support and provide richer feedback.
Our MOOC has been running for a number of years now and I’m delighted that it has been awarded, by one of the internet’s leading MOOC aggregators, Class Central, the accolade of 51st “Best course of all time”, from a pool of 15,000+ MOOCs from almost 1000 universities globally. It placed 2nd of all time in the Engineering category.
My ambition is to develop similar resources for other practical skills. However, it is important that focus is maintained on the reasons for developing such resources: To shift the efforts and academic time away from didactic teaching and towards supporting and providing feedback for students. It would be very easy to automate great swaths of an engineering programme with pre prepared content. But if this pandemic has taught us anything, it is the value that student’s place on contact with real people who are personally invested in their education.