Increasing engagement and understanding among 480 Aerospace students

The challenge was how to engage all 480 students more and at the same time increase their level of understanding of the different concepts.

We structured the lectures in such a way that the concepts followed in a logical order and made the lectures focused on these concepts. We introduced lectures starting from real-life examples of structures and how we could analyse those structures by teaching the related Statics-concepts. Then we illustrated how to apply these concepts to an easy example involving the classroom in solving the problems, and finally we discussed more complicated examples and how to apply the concepts to these.

To engage the whole classroom and see their level of understanding of the concepts we introduced small anonymous quizzes during each of the lectures. The quizzes were designed to test their understanding and had an element of competition in them.

Students were very eager to participate in these and it provided a safe environment for them to provide answers. They appreciated the overall structure of the course, saw it as coherent. It made them think in concepts rather than in what is the solution strategy for a certain problem. The students thought there was a good balance of material explanations as well as going through examples to apply the concepts.

The quizzes made the lectures more engaging and enabled the students to ask more concept related questions. 

The quizzes made the lectures more engaging and enabled the students to ask more concept related questions. 

The students liked the more complicated examples (real-life examples) where they saw how a lot of concepts they have learned so far are tied together and made them understand why these concepts are studied.

• In next course runs, the wish is to spend more time on discussing the more difficult problems (tying the different concepts together) and practicing with and improving the students’ critical attitude.
• Also, it would be nice to make some videos or in-class demonstrations in which the concepts are clearly demonstrated.  
• The quizzes work very well to engage large groups. In this course 200-250 people were typically present during the lectures. Engaging individual students in the class room in solving exercises is definitely possible but it is a bit more challenging to keep the attention of the whole group, but it works fine as well.