Addressing Student's Feedback and Designing New Assignment Structures (Course Convenor for ZEIT3506)

Contemplating the earlier students' feedback and constructive criticism in the first offer in 2019, the School has assigned me the leading role (as the course convenor) in 2020 to further improve the course contents, structures, organisations, assignment structures and learning activities. Knowing this course as a core course for diversified background (i.e., third year/fourth-year course for the Aeronautical, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering programs), I took the leading role to develop new content, new learning experience and assignment structures for delivering in semester 2, 2020. The major involvements were:

  1. Due to the Covid-19, the whole course contents and structures had to re-engineered to fit into the online teaching platform. All the face-to-face contexts had to flesh and modified into the Collaborate platform
  2. Based on the student's feedback, I had revised the course learning outcome as per Bloom's technology. I.e., using 'create', 'evaluate', 'analyse' and 'apply' words as per the course content, student's background and program expectation. 
  3. I have created one 'live document' on the Moodle page for the students of 2020 to see previous year's students' comments and feedbacks and also to gauge how far we have addressed them. This created a transparent environment for the students to see and understand how comprehensively we are following their feedbacks/suggestions. This attempt helped to create an inclusive and supportive learning environment for the students. 
  4. As per my teaching philosophy, I had developed an 'authentic learning', environment, while I came up with many company-specific methods and procedures. More Australian Defence Force related case studies were discussed and covered during this delivery. Those practical examples aka evidence-informed teaching approaches helped to enhance students' learning, which was reflected in 2020's MyExperience report. 
  5. Based on my learning from a Moodle-based course offered by the University (UNSW Canberra Online Teaching 2020), I came to know every ins-and-outs of an effective and successful online delivery. Following those learnings, I have added an assignment component named ‘Online participation and Engagement’. There, I had enforced students to engage on online platforms by posting their learning feedbacks in a specific forum (i.e., Reflective Journal) to ensure ‘community of learning’.  
  6. Another important contribution from me was to add the ‘Group Assignment’ component to this course. Systems Engineering and Management uses group projects for a large proportion of assessment, reflecting the team-based work that graduates are likely to be called upon to undertake. This also helps emphasise the integrated nature of systems engineering and project management. Inarguably, the students found this 'Group assignment' as a good component to create a 'community of inquiry' and 'community of learning' environment.
  7. The marking rubrics for group assignment and another web-based text were created in this offering to provides students with constructive, actionable feedback on their performance and analyses assessment results to inform teaching practice. 'What was expected' and 'what not to do' were clearly communicated in those marking guideline. It was a complete archival for the students.  
  8. The whole 'course plan' was developed and published at the very beginning of this course. That 'online course plan' had every detail for the students to kick-start their learning, scheduling their time allocations, mapping assessment items as per the course learning outcomes. This further included facilitation tasks (online), expected study time, resources, feedback, student support materials and activities. 

   All those efforts and modifications brought 100% agreements out of 55 respondents for me and 44.56% improvement in the percentage agreement for the course (as per the myExperience Report). As per the myExperience Survey report in 2020, I got 100% agreement which clearly shows an increasing trajectory (95.5% was in 2019). The mean was also improved significantly (4.59 in 2019 and 5.09 in 2020). The course % agreement has also increased from 47.8% to 69.1%. 

The evidence of addressing students' course and teaching feedback can also be reflected from the Wordcloud chart for ZEIT3506 in Semester 2-2020 (myExperience report for the course), while the 'content', 'course', 'material' and 'lecture' has been mostly used words among students.  

Online Course Plan_ZEIT3506_S2_2020
myExperience Promotion Report_improving trajectory from 2019 to 2020
Wordcloud Chart for ZEIT3506_S2_2020