Multimodal teaching

Learning materials - The diversity of life

 

Background and objectives

This unit provides an introduction to biological diversity and ecology for students undertaking their first semester of degree-level biology in diverse courses, e.g. environmental science and nursing.

It is based on a unit that had already run for many years and the primary institutional objective of this development was to make the unit/subject suitable for distance education (with no attendance component).

Early discussions showed that it was possible to achieve this and, at the same time, improve the on-campus experience.

Although it was not an objective to reduce teaching loads of the four lecturers involved, it was important that these should not be increased.

The result is a unit that has been radically transformed:

• enhancing the staff-student learning collaboration promoting dialogue rather than lectures
• contextualizing materials to overcome some of the abstraction of the material
• engaging students through a range of media to gain and maintain interest
• presenting challenges to develop higher-order thinking
• developing appropriate literacy along with broadly-applicable tools and strategies for better learning
• respecting diversity of performance, background and time available.

The product

Weekly learning objectives were formally identified and strong guidance was provided through weekly topic outlines that also summarized the sources of materials. Primary knowledge (information) was acquired independently by students (rather than by lectures).

Each week's topic comprised many (short) readings from the prescribed textbook, linked by text materials written by the lecturers, on the CD-ROM. Aspects that were not appropriately covered by the textbook were dealt with in fact sheets, many of which were written by the lecturers.

About 2.5 hours of movies, ranging in duration from 10 seconds to a few minutes and much of it shot in-house, augmented those materials, providing 'live' examples, contextualization and case study materials. Web links further enriched the topics.

Work sheets were used in a range of ways: guiding the students to the important points of movies and reading; pulling together concepts; extending the learners to higher-order thinking. Answers were provided for many of the work sheets - some students preferred to go directly to these rather than undertaking the exercises.

Although some interactive materials are provided on the CD-ROM, most of the content does not readily lend itself to the intense interactions of simulation. Interpersonal, individualized interaction was most favoured, either via the discussion board or in weekly workshops. The quality of Internet access precluded full web-delivery; this was confined to less bandwidth-intensive modalities.

The workshops were loosely structured and were conducted differently by the different lecturers. The objective was to provide discussion around the topic areas, contextualizing, enhancing, remediating but not for delivering more primary material.

Practical exercises could be carried out in the laboratories or at home.

Assessment was by weekly quizzes (online), assignments and examination.

Outcomes

In comparison with the previous year, the class results showed a greatly increased number of high-performing students with no detriment to the pass-level students.

Feedback from focus meetings with students was impressively positive.

Formal contact time for staff was decreased but this was offset by increased engagement in the online discussions, although these could now be conducted at the convenience of the staff.

This is a flagship development for the institution.

Detailed presentations and discussions of the philosophy, design and implementation of this unit to biology teaching staff at 10 Australian institutions have drawn comments ranging from high praise to superlatives.

This project was conducted for a university client. I headed the development team (academic staff and technical support), guided the pedagogy, provided professional development to the staff, created the template, wrote some of the content, wrote and assembled paper-based materials, formatted the content, shot and edited movies, created the graphics and assembled the final product.

The complexity of the pedagogy underlying this unit cannot be adequately expressed in these few paragraphs. For further information, please email.