Overview
The motivation for the NORPPA project is two-fold: to ensure time- and resource-efficient high-quality teaching, and to provide quick and motivating feedback for the students. The NORPPA project focuses on two bachelor level courses given by the Water and Environmental Engineering:
- ENY-C2003 Vesi- ja ympäristötekniikka (Water and Environmental Engineering)
- YYT-C2005 Sovellettu hydrologia (Applied Hydrology)
ENY-C2003 is a compulsory course for the Environmental and Energy Engineering bachelor programme with approximately 150 students each year. YYT-C2005 is an elective course in the same programme attracting annually 25-35 students. Both courses took advantage of automatically assessed exercises (MyCourses Quiz) already the before launch of the NORPPA project, but during the project the exercise sets have been further developed. As the exercises include computational problems based on large datasets, which can be personalized to allow variation in the correct solutions for different students, implementation utilizes also external scripting and the versatile question processing available in the STACK question type.
In addition to computational exercises, for YYT-C2005 course a multiple-choice quiz for recapitulating theoretical content of the first course week was constructed. The idea in the quiz is that it does not only check whether the given choice was correct, but it also provides a feedback with an explanation why the answer was either correct or incorrect. This quiz was piloted in autumn 2018 and subsequently we conducted a student poll to elicit students’ opinion about the quiz. Students appeared to be very happy with such a feedback providing quiz as the average rate for the usefulness of the quiz was 4.22 / 5.
An educational consultant adLearning (http://www.adlearning.com/) was utilized in facilitating workshops for creating a pool of multiple choice questions.
Platforms and tools
MyCourses (Moodle) Quiz, STACK, Python
Pedagogical methods
The pedagogical foundation for NORPPA project builds on the ideas of constructivism and constructive alignment (e.g. Biggs 2003; Biggs & Tang 2011): our view is that all learning activities from teaching to assessment should be planned in a consistent manner. The MyCourses-based exercises have been developed and revised based on this idea, with the aim that the assignments and their assessments are as clear as possible for the students and that students also receive regular and quick feedback on their work.
Involved courses
ENY-C2003 – Vesi- ja ympäristötekniikka (Water and Environmental Engineering) (5 ETCS)
YYT-C2005 – Sovellettu hydrologia (Applied Hydrology) (5 ETCS)
People
Teemu Kokkonen
School of Engineering
Pilot leader
Marko Keskinen
School of Engineering
Pilot leader
Sara Saukkonen
School of Engineering
Assistant
