CREATING AN ONLINE VERSION OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL GEOTECHNICS COURSE: PEDAGOGICAL OPPORTUNITIES
Marina Pantazidou1; Kyriakos Kandris1
1 National Technical University of Athens
Resumo
CREATING AN ONLINE VERSION OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL GEOTECHNICS COURSE: LOGISTICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL OPPORTUNITIES Marina PANTAZIDOU, Kyriakos KANDRIS National Technical University of Athens, Zografou, Greece mpanta@central.ntua.gr, kkandris@gmail.com Abstract This paper describes the changes prompted by transforming a lecture-based course to an online version, as well as the intended and some unintended outcomes resulting from these changes. The changes implemented belong in three major categories: 1) Logistical changes: - breaking presentations into smaller sections, mainly in order to have smaller video files; - giving more meaningful titles to presentations; - explicitly highlighting in writing main points. Note. The higher visibility of material provided a strong incentive for making every presentation more "professional-looking". 2) Methodological changes: Application of research-based good practices - Making more transparent to students the way the course was designed. - Supplementing course-level learning objectives with detailed learning objectives for each course section. - Reordering contents to make clearer to students the necessity of certain course contents. (This reorganization makes unnecessary the approach of: "you will see later the usefulness of what I teach you now".) - Starting from qualitative understanding before moving to quantitative-mathematical description. This also helped with revisiting topics and, thus, reinforcing key concepts. - Highlighting connections among course topics: key concepts introduced during the first half of the course are later reinforced several times. 3) Content-related changes: Production of additional educational material aiming at: - addressing problematic concepts, as evidenced from past students' performance; - lessening the cognitive burden of students (the reduction is presumed, not tested); - highlighting links with other civil engineering topics and courses. One of the important realizations of the process was that it turned out to
Palavras-chave: course design; civil engineering; evidence-based practice; case study