Student success in South African higher education institutions (HEIs) is poor and universities have not been successful in implementing strategies to improve students' learning experiences. Tutoring has been identified as an effective strategy to improve student success but is often used inconsistently and without pedagogical justification. The…

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…

Large undergraduate courses make it difficult for students to achieve learning outcomes, in part due to the lack of resources available to course instructors to support student learning in these intimidating and often impersonal settings. One way to support instructor teaching and student learning is the implementation of undergraduate peer…

A number of researchers have explored the role and nature of design in education, proposing a diverse array of life cycle models. Design plays subtly different roles in each of these models. The learning design research community is shifting its attention from the representation of pedagogical plans to considering design as an ongoing process. As…

Tutorials/discussion classes are seen as an essential part of the teaching mix in the natural sciences, because that is where problems can be solved and course content is applied. Learning support provided by teaching assistants may free up the lecturer to do research, but are these assistants sufficiently well trained and well informed? Do…

Introduction: Recent investigations have emphasized the need for university teachers to develop tutorial programs for students at university. Many universities are committed to broadening research on university teaching that will sharpen academic performance and levels of student satisfaction. Tutoring programs improve the development of the…

Teaching academics are under pressure to move away from traditional lecture-tutorial teaching modes to less traditional forms. Such pressures are in addition to changes to funding arrangements and other developments that increasingly oblige universities to operate as businesses. The flow-on effects for teachers are increased student:staff ratios,…

Lee Shulman's concept of signature pedagogies in the professions has captured the imagination of many researchers and educators. In higher education, the concept has been extended to teaching in particular disciplines, and it is here argued that the concept of signature pedagogy can be usefully extended to an influential teaching system in the…

This article discusses a Design for Learning project in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where academic and personal support for students was interwoven in their first semester. Staff of the Academic Language and Learning Unit (ALLU) worked with discipline staff to develop their students' capabilities across a range of disciplines,…

A comparison of courses that do or do not utilize a Course Management System (CMS) was undertaken from the standpoint of a new faculty member. Seven distinct advantages were found with CMS implementation including initial tutorial group set-ups, email communication, sharing of student generated products, sharing of instructor-generated products,…

In order to increase engagement and to consolidate skills, a tutorial-based skills course (module) was introduced as a compulsory component of first-year in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen. We evaluated whether students had attained certain "graduate attributes" during the course, comprising: transferable and…

This article describes a C-SAP-funded project evaluating the introduction of a new tutorial programme for first year Sociology students, which sought to integrate a "skills framework" to enable students to develop a range of academic skills alongside their study of the subject. The pegagogical and institutional background to the decision…

For the thirty-eighth time, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

Most faculty will agree that students must learn to write well (Emerson, MacKay, MacKay, & Funnell, 2006), and in the sciences, a variety of approaches have been taken. In the College of Physical and Engineering Science at the University of Guelph, we have developed a way of embedding research, writing, and analytical skills into an…

Discusses tutorials and their origins, comparing them to lectures and seminars. Expounds on the objectives of tutorials and the advantages for both students and tutors alike. Maintains that tutorials are student centered and thus lead to a higher quality learning environment. (RW)