A Partnership in Blended Learning: Staff and Student Perspectives
This post is written by Dr. Nick Weise and Mr. Dukula De Alwis Jayasinghe.
Nick is a Lecturer is at the University of Manchester, Academic Lead for Teaching & Learning Enhancement for his department and an Inaugural Fellow of the Institute for Teaching & Learning. Dukula is a 3rd Year Chemistry student at the University of Manchester and coordinator of his department’s Peer-assisted Study Sessions.
Staff Perspective
Long before COVID-19 and the urgent need for blended learning, I tried out a flipped classroom approach for a module of 8 lectures I was providing sabbatical cover for. My theory was that, if it did not work as the literature promised, it would not cause long-term issues as the course would revert to a more traditional style with the original lecturer the year after. Nothing to lose, right? Except the time to come up with many new questions and exercises to fill the face-to-face sessions with relevant and meaningful learning opportunities…
Figure 1: a traditional CHEM unit 8 lecture module (top) vs. a flipped learning variant (bottom)
One question this new task raised for me was: Am I really the best placed person to be designing learning activities for the module I lecture? Sure, I can take a guess at what the students might find difficult and make some exercises based on that. But wouldn’t students who had already taken the unit in a previous year and had some sort of training in facilitation of learning be more suitable for the job?
Peer-assisted Study Sessions (or PASS) are available to all first year students and delivered by 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students who are centrally trained in relevant learning theories and facilitation skills. They design activities and support other students in taking control of their studies. To me, any PASS Leader who has taken my unit would be an expert by experience in both delivering and receiving learning support — therefore their being given control over the active learning component of the course would be invaluable. The results of implementing this for the sabbatical cover motivated me to employ this mixture of blended, peer-led learning for all CHEM units I lecture on.
Student Perspective
Personally, I have had several positive impacts by collaborating and working with Dr. Nick Weise to create exercises for one of the modules he lectures at The University of Manchester.
For me, the most important impact was the sense of community. I personally felt an intrinsic motivation within myself when I started working on creating these exercises and further, a sense of belongingness within the chemistry department. Not only I got to know Dr. Nick much better, but I think he got to know me as a student as well, and further, the idea of that I will be helping the next year students who will be taking the module was in fact a non — monetary reward for me. Upon working with Dr. Nick, I felt an affective organisational commitment (Allen and Mayer, 1990) to the university as a whole and personally felt within me that I will put more effort in the next few collaborations I will work upon — which I did.
This work also improved my critical thinking, logic and understanding of the material covered in the lecture module which immensely helped me in the examinations. One needs to be aware and be able to apply the material they have learnt in order to create questions and exercises for each topic, and by doing this work, I was not only able to apply what I learnt in this module, but was able to go further and propose questions from the other chemistry modules relevant to the course content. In simple words — it helped me to think out of the box.
Figure 2: an excerpt from a CHEM unit podcast where Nick Weise attempts to explain the flipped approach to students who are about to experience it.
