The impact of live streaming module-wide events in student engagement and motivation

Project leader(s): Linda MooreMaria Velasco-Garcia
Theme: Technologies for STEM learning
Faculty: STEM
Status: Archived
Dates: May 2018 to February 2022

Winner of the 4th Best Poster Competition at the 8th eSTEeM Annual Conference, 8-9 May 2019.

S111 was first presented in 16J as the new online only introductory interdisciplinary module in science. As part of its tuition strategy, S111 provided a series of “Discover more about…” interactive labcasts (one for each subject discipline) and a live science debate. These module-wide events are delivered by central academics and recordings are available post event.

The aims of these tutorials were:

To help build a science community early on in the students studies;
To improve retention and progression by helping students with their subject choices;
To provide opportunities for students to engage directly with the central module team (and vice-versa);
To demonstrate research-led teaching by allowing students to engage with current research and topical issues.

While these events were perceived to be successful in 16J, this is only based on the numbers of students attending live and watching recordings, plus anecdotal students’ comments.

This project would allow the module-wide events to be fully evaluated. The evaluation will include widgets on Stadium during live events and surveys and follow up interviews post-events. The aim would be to give a greater understanding of student engagement with these events to have a greater understanding of how students use these to support their learning. This would help tailor and justify the value of live events. On a practical basis, it will influence the frequency and timing of these events in later presentations, initially for S111, but findings may also impact on other modules.

S111 has two presentations and for 17J/18B the above events will be combined and delivered once. Another change is that the live debate is no longer exclusively for S111 and will be for the wider community of science students. By surveying different cohorts of students, the project will also investigate whether these changes are appropriate or not. Results will directly feed into the tuition strategy for later presentations.