Department of Engineering

Audio-visual teaching aids for students

16 May 2007

Dr Matthew Juniper of the Energy group at the Department has created a set of online animations to supplement lectures for his students. Initially Matthew was keen to save time when repeating basic concepts and problem solving techniques in supervisions. He decided to create animations that show him describing a concept in real time, with a tablet PC recording both his handwriting and a running commentary. Often there are many ways to explain a concept but in a lecture there may only time for one explanation. The animations allow students to explore another version that might make more sense to them.

Matthew went on to create animations of worked examples related to the example paper questions that the students do before supervisions. Students who are stuck on a particular part of an examples paper question can watch the worked examples at their own pace and may get the hint they need to complete the question by themselves. This can free up time in supervisions for discussion of the concepts.

In 2005/06 Matthew trialled the animations on the 3rd year Fluid Mechanics students as part of a study by the Cambridge-M.I.T. Institute. The additional materials had a positive effect on all the measured aspects of supervisions, particularly on the students' ability to answer the questions and on students' conceptual understanding. One student said "I found the audio-visual presentation particularly helpful because I could replay it on demand." A supervisor found that "the students who used the additional materials could get a lot further in the questions. Those who did not use them despaired and gave up, expecting to be told all in the supervision." Students found these aids very useful, particularly when a new concept was introduced, and for exploring the most difficult concepts. They now form part of the 2nd year Fluid Mechanics course.

The University of Cambridge's 'Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies' (CARET) http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/ whose services are available to those within the university wishing to use technology to support research, teaching or learning, have assisted Matthew develop his methodology for creating the teaching aids. John Norman director of CARET has shown the teaching aids to many experts in the field of online teaching materials, and has had nothing but extremely enthusiastic feedback on Matt's technique for economic and rapid production of such high quality content.

Matthew is keen to show other lecturers how easy it is to create the animations and that in the long term they will not only save teaching time but help to achieve better quality teaching. Matthew is inviting teaching staff to hear more about the animations and how to create them in a talk at 11am on Thursday 24th May in Lecture Room 6. He has also created a website that shows some examples of the animations and describes the process in more detail. This can be found at http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mpj1001/AM_website/index.html

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