When the first national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, all higher educational institutions in Ireland moved to remote learning and have effectively remained in this mode ever since. The situation presented enormous challenges for many mathematics lecturers who had not delivered lectures or tutorials online before. This study looks…

This paper describes and analyses the implementation of a "flipped classroom" approach, in an undergraduate mathematics course on numerical methods. The approach replaced all the lecture contents by instructor-made videos and was implemented in the consecutive years 2014 and 2015. The sequential case study presented here begins with an…

We report on the implementation of a monitoring scheme by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. The scheme was introduced in an attempt to increase the level and quality of students' engagement with certain aspects of their undergraduate course. It is well documented that students with higher…

Online plagiarism tutorials are increasingly popular in higher education, as faculty and staff try to curb the plagiarism epidemic. Yet no research has validated the efficacy of such tools in minimizing plagiarism in the sciences. Our study compared three plagiarism-avoidance training regimens (i.e., no training, online tutorial, or homework…

This Teaching Note reports on an initiative designed to increase the number of students who undertake homework in the absence of formal rewards, such as additional marks. While the initiative was successful in increasing the number of students who attempted the homework each week, preliminary findings suggest it may have been accompanied by a fall…

The art of teaching freshmen students is undergoing a rapid paradigm change. Classical forms of teaching are not applicable any more and an unmanageable offer of new multimedia tools and concepts is glutting the market. Moreover, compared to previous courses, the class size triples. In view of these challenges, we implemented a new teaching…

The aim of this study is to evaluate a teaching strategy designed to teach first-year undergraduate life sciences students at a research university how to learn to read authentic research articles. Our approach--based on the work done in the field of genre analysis and argumentation theory--means that we teach students to read research articles by…

We apply a "tutorial design process", which has proven to be successful for a number of physics topics, to design curricular materials or "tutorials" aimed at improving student understanding of important concepts in a university-level introductory materials science and engineering course. The process involves the identification…

This article examines motivational potentialities in remedial mathematics education within an ethical context, applying a model for ethical decision making in education developed by Shapiro and Stefkovich, in which three broad ethical categories are discussed: the ethic of justice, the ethic of care, and the ethic of critique. These ethical…