The use of e-learning, education and the traditional Engineering pedagogy

The traditional pedagogy in engineering is that of one lecturer standing in front of a classroom of students.

The lecturer writes on the board, the students copy it down, there is an assumption that knowledge and understanding is transferred during the writing and copying process. 

The measurement of that knowledge transfer is by means of a 3 hour exam where the more a student can repeat word for word the notes they had previously written and replicate a diagram shown in class, the higher the grade.

To me the pedagogy in engineering always favoured those students with a good memory.  Those who could recall whole paragraphs of text explaining complex processes, and not those who understood the real world applications, or who could build structures or evaluate forensic evidence.

Upon graduating, I realized quite quickly in my first industrial job, that I had not been given the skills that industry required in terms of problem solving and teamwork, but I was equipped with a brain full of memorized constants and equations, which I then learned were most often just easily looked up in a textbook.

I found that as a new lecturer I have entered the same pedagogy as a teacher, that I studied under as a student, but now rather than be frustrated with the system, I am delighted to have the power to change the system using constructive alignment principles in the hope that my students do not just learn facts for a test, but gain skills for life.

I really wanted to incorporate Hattie's “Visible teaching and learning” theory into my classes

·    (Hattie, J. (2009). The Black Box of Tertiary Assessment: An Impending Revolution. In L. H. Meyer, S. Davidson, H. Anderson, R. Fletcher, P.M. Johnston, & M. Rees (Eds.), Tertiary Assessment & Higher Education Student Outcomes: Policy, Practice & Research (pp.259-275). Wellington, New Zealand: Ako Aotearoa)

So this semester I spent a lot of time using e-learning (mostly facebook) and creating short video's for each of my classes explaining the principles that were to be covered for each lecture.  I made the video's informative yet casual, humorous yet practical.  I wanted to try a different approach to teaching the same boring material, and I think it was quite successful.

So I thought I would share the series of video's with the rest of the world, so you too can learn about the basics of materials engineering :)

Video 1 - Introduction to Fracture Mechanics



Video 2 - Ductile and Brittle Behaviour

Video 3 - Cracks Weaken Materials




Video 4 - Fatigue in Materials



Video 5 - Creep of Materials



Video 6 - Introduction to Polymers




Video 7 - Glass Transition Temperature of Polymers



Video 8 - Optical Properties of Polymers



Video 9 - Viscoelastic models



Video 10 - Composites



Video 11 - Biomaterials