Enhancing Undergraduate Teaching and Feedback using Social Media - an Engineering Case Study.

For large modules taught within the College of Engineering at Swansea University such as the level 1 module Scientific and Engineering Skills (EG168) or the Engineering Analysis (EG189/190) mathematics courses, it is a considerable challenge for the lecturer(s) to develop a meaningful relationship with students. Lecture cohorts on these modules are large (250+ students) and examples are delivered through smaller classes (~50 students) and laboratory sessions delivered by supplementary lecturers and/or postdoctoral researchers. This inevitably leads to a lack of continuity and meaningful engagement with regards to students' contact with the lecturer. It also places a significant pressure on 'office hours' and email. It is common in student module feedback that the generic theory on these courses is not linked closely enough to discipline-specific engineering examples. Often this is due to wide range of disciplines studying the course (the EG168 module is taken by all level 1 engineering students and sports science students). This paper details a project aimed at tackling these problems by establishing an online community, using the social networking facility Twitter to connect students to the lecturer, who was able to drip feed examples to students in the form of online video 'mini lectures' posted and discussed via Twitter. It will be argued that this not only allowed an enhanced sense of affinity and belonging within the module cohort, but also improved real time feedback for the lecturer who was able to adjust future lecture content based on the feedback being received via Twitter. This technique was initially trialled on the EG168 Scientific and Engineering Skills module: a very large module (550 students) taken by students in the first term of their degree at Swansea University. It has more recently been adopted by other lecturers within the College on a range of modules. One of the aims within the EG168 module in recent deliveries has been to try and tailor examples to specific engineering disciplines whilst delivering generic content to the whole cohort through large lectures. It will be shown that delivery of online multimedia discipline-specific examples to students via the web (posted and discussed using Twitter) was a significant factor that helped achieve this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]