Technology enhances education
AT Monash University Malaysia’s School of Information Technology, students can expect more interactive and engaging classes as more lecturers are using mobile technologies in their teaching.
Senior lecturer Dr Chew Esyin says academics from the school are now encouraged to incorporate various forms of technologies into their teaching to improve the learning process.
“Students generally feel that there is a lack of formative feedback from teaching staff on students’ work. There are currently a lot of research and teaching initiatives to provide richer assessment and feedback. We need to move away from having a grade- dominant culture to enhance our students’ learning experience,” she says.
Dr Chew, who is a technology- enhanced learning, teaching and assessment researcher, says one of the learning technologies used at the school is the Personal Response System ( PRS).
“PRS allows us to conduct real- time question- and- answer sessions in classes through the use of clickers and Socrative. com.
“It allows us to pose questions to our students and receive immediate responses from the entire class. We are able to see how many students in a class have responded to a question and from there, we can gauge their understanding and how well the class performs. PRS can be used for s reat un ts e
Both clickers and Socrative collect feedback from students and tabulate the results of these responses immediately, which the lecturer can view and assess to provide feedback.
Dr Chew says students are often asked multiple- choice or open questions that prompt critical thinking during these sessions.
“There are no fixed answers to these questions and the responses from the class can be varied, which always leads to lively class discussions that stimulate students’ thinking,” she says.
“There has been a lot of positive feedback from students who have experienced such seamless teaching methods. Students find the learning process more interactive, stimulating, engaging and meaningful.”
Dr Chew says that the school also encourages students to use other technology such as ScreenBeam to share their work and Turnitin to check the originality of their written work.
In her research on online assessment and feedback ( Turnitin, Grademark and Peermark), Dr Chew found that Turnitin enabled students to conduct self- service and independent learning through the pedagogical use of the originality report.
“Previously, tools such as Turnitin were mainly used by academics as a policing tool to check against plagiarism, but these days, we want our students to take the initiative it so that they can improve their ments and other projects, including hesis,” she ys. hew says that even academics could t from the use of such technology. opes that in the near future, eermark, two other rnitin, will also be used aysia. r is an online marking cademics while Peermark to read, review and pers submitted by their m fo ws stu luate ssma “With too such as Grademark, we an achieve an environmentally friendly marking system, where academics can provide richer feedback to students. he other hand, k will help students ubject from a fresh tive when they read people’s work and the ments on their papers that en based on the same ment criteria,” she says.
more information about rogrammes offered at the ol of Information ology in Monash sia, visit www. infotech. sh. edu. my.