Task: Improving Learning Experience in Lecture Theaters

Hey all, welcome back! This week’s 2 week assignment is what Dr Reddy classified it as a nightmare assignment! Thanks for the warning Dr Reddy. Well it sort of is, because it’s a open ended problem, we can use any related methods to achieve this and this flexibility is not something very welcoming. Firstly, we need to find out or at least prepare what methods and analyzing framework to use before deciding on how are we going to tackle this. My Team, j.ed.ka (pronounced as jed-ker) brainstormed about the methods and framework. We adopted Ethnographic studies for the preliminary work then by using the 4 thread of experience framework of the technology used during lecture for the analyzing part, we then need to decide on which theater to go into.

We wanted to go to a lecture that will potentially use more technological stuff in the lecture theater than any other lectures. And with the help of these technologies does it help to make student experience better or the converse. We try to shy away from most potentially sleeping lectures even though the potential issues and problems can be obvious, we wanted the use of more technological equipment to be used than just the computer, projector and microphone. With all these criteria in mind, we search for an interesting lecture to crash into. Eventually we chose a Arts module, GEK2020 Introduction to Film Art. It’s a GEM for all, which means there will be a mixture of different faculties of students. That mix will widen our scope of study. We should be able to understand the lecture too! Besides doing ethnographic studies, we will also be interviewing students and the lecturer using the 4 thread of experience framework. With all these criteria and method and framework, we are ready for our discrete outing. In order to be discrete, we video tape down more than half of the lecture before the battery went flat. Besides placing the video camera in a camouflage area, we locate ourselves in different areas of the theater to get a overall view of the lecture. It was a pleasant lecture and an interesting one. The concepts are clear and i can still remember it till now! Not bad for a first timer in this lecture even after school started for weeks. One of the reason is of course the interest in the topic itself, but i think the credit should give it to the lecturer too, Dr Gilbert Yeoh. He is dressed pleasantly, folded up long sleeve shirt and pants, wore glasses and he is a Harvard graduate! He must be smart! Real smart. Hah. Throughout our observation, i must say he is quite prepared in his lecture. He knows well how to operate the DVD player, lightings, and most of the technology stuff in theater. He is meticulous as well. He knows when to dim down the lights, knows when to give break, and also explain it clearly with video examples. However he is a little bland in his delivery. He also tends to repeat his points a tad too many times. There are a lot of influencers in the whole experience of the lecture.

Article 1: Using evaluate to improve student learning.

Article 2: Ethnographic Studies can Inform Agencies’ Action.

After observing the students, lecturer and the surroundings, we read up a few articles that talks about ethnography. They helped us to understand how to further break down our problems into related parts and also gave us a group of points that might affect the experience in a lecture. Besides categorizing our findings into time, place, environment/situational factors, lecturer and students, we adopted another kind of categorizing for our problem solving section. This type of categorizing is broad enough and yet covers those problems mentioned in our findings. We also interview some students and lecturer using the 4 threads of experience method. We are glad that Dr Gilbert Yeoh did reply our email on time! Appreciate Dr Gilbert Yeoh for your valuable feedback!

I think ethnography studies is fun and interesting and also self reflecting when the problem is something you can relate to. As research have already shown that facilities in a lecture theater can help improve the learning experience, there are still other factors that are incontrollable. That is the lecturer and students. To monitor/observe behaviour, using cameras and other sort of image capturing devices tend to fail as it will have an affect directly or indirectly on the participants. Being a spy physically is still by far the better option in doing this type of observations. And i had fun doing that! Although i have to hide what i was scribbling down during lecture. haha. We could also actually use Culture probe method to study about this learning experience if we were to be given more time. That study will probably last about a year. However the participant must do it willingly without any incentives involved, other wise the findings might not be accurate. To see what I have scribbled down during the lecture, click here for part 1, here for part 2.

To download Power Point slides, interview with Dr Gilbert Yeoh, interview with Respondent 1 & respondent 2.