Excellence in teaching

Brian Stone has been Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UWA since 1981 and Dr Nathan Scott has a teaching/research appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. They jointly won an Excellence in Innovation in Teaching Award in 1996. Brian Stone has also won two Excellence in Teaching Awards in 1990 and 1994.

We have a computer-based tutorial system that all of our first-year engineering students use in Dynamics and Statics. The system is really just an automated way of setting assignments (problems) for the students to do, and it also 'marks' the answers the students give. We have set it up so that students enter numerical answers and the system tries to give them feedback - with clear diagrams - about why an incorrect answer is wrong. Quite early in 1995, the first year of use, we observed something quite unexpected. Although we had not designed the system specifically to encourage collaboration, we saw that students were helping one another a great deal. We found that classes of about fifty students using the system were content to have only one tutor present, since most routine difficulties were handled either by the computer diagnostics or by helpful other students. A new sort of classroom culture emerged, where the tutor did not dominate the class, and where students were happy to share the work of understanding the material. Naturally there was a 'down' side as well, with some students making inappropriate use of others' learning, but we feel the general advantages of the system far outweighed these. Having now observed students for more than two years, we have come to some general conclusions about why the system encourages students to help one another. The computer room we were using (the Maths Computing Laboratory) was a large hall with 128 computers in it, and there were no other computing facilities offered to the students. Consequently the room became a sort of general meeting place for students working on Dynamics. During the assigned tutorial hours the room was full, and students helped one another. At other times it was also used since students knew they could find helpful peers there at any time.

We programmed the tutorial system to set regular deadlines, which we also feel was important since it meant that, when students were together in the lab, they would be working on related matters, often the same problem. We imagine - without any experimental evidence - that students would be less willing to help others if they were working on completely different subjects. When we saw what was happening in 1995 we were encouraged to extend the system to allow for greater student-student interaction by adding a messaging system. This allowed students to post queries on any problem at any time and staff or students could respond. All queries and responses were attached to the relevant problem and so became a useful resource. To our surprise students rarely responded to any other student's query, it was left to staff to do so. However, once a question was answered by staff it did not need to be answered again as it was then available to all students.

The system we used in 1995 and 1996 is still being used at several institutions. However, in our own teaching we have now moved to a new, Web-based version. We did this because we saw that few institutions around the world had large numbers of Macintosh computers, and we plan to market our new shell in the next few months. If you would like to try our new system you should write to Prof. Stone (bjs@mech.uwa.edu.au) and we will give you a temporary 'student' identity.